Photogravure

Elmgreen & Dragset , Thomas Demand, Markus Draper

Niels Borch Jensen’s Copenhagen print studio has been working with photogravure since the early 1990s in order to accommodate contemporary artists’ desire to include photographic material into their work. For the 2018 European Month of Photography Berlin, the Berlin gallery will present works by Thomas Demand, Markus Draper, and Elmgreen & Dragset.

Photogravure is one of the oldest and most haptic ways of transferring a photo to a piece of paper: a photopositive is transferred onto a printing plate by exposing its light-sensitive material through a finely rasterized film, thereby creating microscopic, funnel-shaped indentations in the plate’s surface. Depending on their depth, these indentations hold different amounts of ink during the printing process and allow for a more extensive color gradation than any other printing technique.