NEW YORK – Craig F. Starr Gallery is pleased to announce Jasper Johns Prints, which runs from October 10 through November 26, 2008. The exhibition is a selection of the artist’s graphic work, including a range of motifs such as flags, numbers, and maps. A fully illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition with an essay by poet, critic, and editor John Yau. 

In 1960 Tatyana Grossman invited Jasper Johns to ULAE, her printmaking workshop on Long Island. There he began what would become a lifelong involvement with the medium. His initial efforts were with lithography, then gradually expanding to invlude other printmaking techniques such as etching, silkscreen, and aquatint, sometimes combining more than one process within a single work.

Printmaking allowed Johns to expand upon ideas already present in his work, such as layering, doubling, positive and negative inversions, and the tripartite divisions of his color palette. The layering of numbers in 0 Through 9, 1960, for example, challenges the viewer to distinguish the factual reality of the individual numerals and simultaneously to look “through” them, to look at these familiar symbols and to behold their strangeness. In his Flag series of 1960, each of three works is printed in black, white, or gray and is further differentiated by changes in the stone matrix—each work is not only a new color, but a new image.

Also included in the show is Johns’ rare 1960-63 0-9 portfolio with its original balsa wood box and the 1962 lithograph False Start II. Examples of both of these works were recently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition Jasper Johns Gray.