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until 18.04. | #4940ARTatBerlin | Galerie Martin Mertens shows from Saturday, 28. February 2026 the group exhibition “Masters of Colour Woodblock Printing” by the artist Eline Brontsema, Brian Curling, Christine Ebersbach and Susanne Werdin.
The exhibition brings together four artists who have continued the traditional technique of colour woodcut in very different forms and brought it to great mastery.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, woodcut printing lost its importance due to new printing techniques and industrial reproduction. However, colour woodcut printing experienced a resurgence around 1900, particularly in the wake of the Japanese ukiyo-e woodcut, which gave European artists new impetus in composition, colour and surface design. In Germany, representatives of Expressionism such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff took up the technique and used colour woodcut as a direct, powerful means of expression. The strong simplification of forms and the expressive use of colour made it a central medium of modernism.
After the Second World War, colour woodcut continued to be used in Germany and Europe in both fine art and book and graphic design, but increasingly outside the mainstream of art history. Since the 1970s, the technique has experienced a revival: contemporary artists are experimenting with large-format prints, new materials, hybrid processes and the combination of analogue and digital processes. To this day, colour woodcut in Germany and Europe stands for a conscious engagement with craft tradition, history and the possibilities of contemporary forms of artistic expression.
Dutch artist Eline Brontsema completed her studies in 2020 with woodcuts and paintings. For her prints, she uses the reduction technique, also known as the ‘suicide method’: the print is created from a single woodblock for all the different colours. The woodblock is systematically destroyed, and a mistake in cutting can ruin an entire print run. Part of the block is cut away so that the higher parts absorb the ink. The first colour can now be printed, and the entire print run is created using this first colour.
The works then have to dry for a few days, during which time the next part can be cut away. Then the next colour can be printed. This process must be repeated until the print is finished, which is a very time-consuming way of working. While this woodcut technique traditionally uses only a limited number of colours, she uses many different layers of colour, which gives her works painterly qualities. Composition is very important to her, and the rhythm of the forms, the harmony of colours and the play of light and shadow are crucial to the atmosphere of a place she wants to depict.
American-born Brian Curling (born in 1976 in Cadiz, Kentucky, USA, lives and works in Dresden) is an artist whose work encompasses a wide range of printmaking techniques, installations and drawings. His works explore the fluid and ever-evolving nature of identity, shaped by time, place and personal experience.
Using structures, surfaces, shapes and colours, the artist repeatedly explores the artistic possibilities of woodcut in his subtly designed works on paper in an experimental and sensitive manner. The results are impressive in their consistency and precision: delicate layers of Japanese paper are stacked on top of each other, light and airy, with ‘space in between’… Printed in different colours, they create a lucid interplay of visual impressions when placed on top of and alongside each other.
“Brian Curling’s works captivate with their masterful use of paper, the select nature of which is striking. The printing blocks are placed next to each other and varied. The technique of woodcutting and its large-format implementation, as well as the combination with drypoint or etching, testify to the artist’s craftsmanship. His works merge into peaceful metaphors of becoming and passing away, quietly making their mark in the noise of the present,” writes art historian Iris Häckel.
Christine Ebersbach finds her motifs in Iceland, the Lofoten Islands, Denmark and the German coast. “These are landscapes with a barren, cool aura: mountains, fjords, steep slopes, glacier fields, beaches, mudflats covered only with snow and scree, hardly any plants, no people – rocks, water and sky. The surfaces of her woodcuts actually shimmer and glimmer, because Christine Ebersbach also works with transparent colours here. She prints two, usually three, rarely four tones on top of each other: the colour space becomes similar in consistency to that of her watercolours, but even denser, more reduced, more present,” writes Dr Katrin Arrieta (Director of the Ahrenshoop Art Museum). She herself adds:
“Nature becomes a designed landscape through human intervention.
I am interested in landscapes that can become a mirror of human sensibilities through their vastness, silence, drama, whimsicality or seclusion. I am interested in landscapes that are tamed, developed and used through large or small human interventions. I am interested in landscapes in which people settle – with roads and bridges connecting places, landing stages representing departure and arrival, signs that represent attempts to find one’s way, building forms that emerge from their function. I am interested in landscapes that set limits to human activity.”
Susanne Werdin describes her theme as ‘… the relationship between the visible and the invisible, between depth and surface, and between the concealed and the translucent. I construct angular relationships, directional gradients, surface densities, colour penetrations and movement developments as a kind of “reflection” of universal events.’
Julia Blume writes about Susanne Werdin: “The diversity of media in her artistic work is linked by a common thread of constantly renewed exploration of elementary forms and colours. She uses them to create rhythms, compose surfaces and play with the concealed, the translucent and the surprisingly flashy. The formal means she uses are identifiable: lines, circles, their segments, triangles, squares, rectangles. Set in relation to the format and realised with a few effective colours, she creates her images in graphic print or as paintings, layered, transparent and rich in contrast.”
Vernissage: Saturday, 28. February 2026, 6 – 9 pm
Exhibition period: Saturday, 28. February – Saturday, 18. April 2026
To the gallery
Title image caption: © Courtesy of Galerie Martin Mertens
Exhibtion Masters of Colour Woodblock Printing – Galerie Martin Mertens | Contemporary Art in Berlin | Exhibtions Berlin Galleries | ART at Berlin
