Printmaking/Printed Image Studio II

COURSE OUTLINE 

Contemporary printmaking is approached as an integral component of today’s visual arts discourse. It functions both as a conceptual and practical framework for engaging with the printed image and the exploration of everyday experience.

What distinguishes printmaking are its inherent characteristics: repetition, multiplicity, and mechanical mediation. Due to its unique methodologies, printmaking articulates essential concerns of contemporary art – particularly the creation of meaning through “mechanical” means. It is crucial to recognize that the technologies and techniques of the medium impose their own structures and values onto images and their content. The aesthetic influence of technique upon form is therefore decisive. The medium is not neutral; it generates aesthetic, ideological, and semantic content.

The pursuit of a conceptual and artistic inquiry calls for an expanded and contemporary perspective – both visual and practical. This involves constructing an artistic, aesthetic, and theoretical discourse that operates as a visual language, aiming at the comprehension and internalisation of global artistic practices.

Experimentation and research are fundamental in developing the conceptual and artistic tools necessary for understanding and creating contemporary visual works. These works seek to represent and give meaning to personal subjectivity as well as to the broader social, political, and economic context.

The objective is the formation of a contemporary, experimental, and critical visual language – open to the realities of daily life and capable of articulating a visual-critical discourse. Through this process, the student-artist is encouraged to define the aesthetic framework of their own artistic production: work that produces meaning, rather than merely reproducing existing forms.

Contemporary artistic practices are employed in tandem with other forms of art, non-art, and interdisciplinary experimentation (e.g. various printmaking techniques, the spatial printed image, photography, video art, moving image, performance, etc.). These enrich artistic representation and individual expression. The search for a historical and emancipatory aesthetic, as a mode of thought that is sharp, critical, and avant-garde, leads to the creation of work that resists assimilation and absorption, while being capable of interpreting the ethical, political, historical, and social framework, rather than being shaped by it.

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Semester Overview

1st & 2nd Semesters

Introduction to the concept of drawing as an autonomous artistic and expressive language.

Methodology of drawing and the structure of the drawn image.

Drawing as an aesthetic object and social practice.

Contemporary representation techniques.

History and theory, screenings, presentations, discussions, bibliographic research.

3rd & 4th Semesters

Introduction to colour: the language of colour, methodology, theory, and history.

Printmaking as a medium of contemporary art and the printed image.

Technological tools and representation.

Introduction to the language of contemporary printmaking (new media and technological image forms).

Methodologies, techniques, history and theory.

History and theory, screenings, presentations, discussions, bibliographic research.

5th & 6th Semesters

Printmaking and the printed image in contemporary art.

Introduction to the language of contemporary printmaking (new media and technological image forms).

The book as an artistic object.

The rhetoric of the printed image (theoretical and political dimensions of the printed and moving image).

History and theory, screenings, presentations, discussions, bibliographic research.

7th & 8th Semesters

New media and digital printmaking: digital aesthetics.

Introduction to the language of photography and video.

The rhetoric of the image (theoretical and political dimensions of the printed and moving image).

Conditions for the creation of meaning in contemporary artworks.

Image reproduction technologies.

Investigating the ideological identity of the artistic subject.

History and theory, screenings, presentations, discussions, bibliographic research.

9th & 10th Semesters

THESIS PROJECT

Individual supervision and support for the preparation of the graduation project.

Composition of a written component grounding the thesis both theoretically and historically.

Bibliographic research, history, theory.