Artwork of the 80's
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Artists & Works
Nancy Graves
American (1940-95)
LITHOGRAPHS BASED ON GEOLOGIC MAPS OF LUNAR ORBITER AND APOLLO LANDING SITE (1972)
5 lithographs
22.5" x 30"

STYLE: PRINTMAKING

  

Nancy Graves studied at the Yale School of Art and Architecture and received a Fulbright to travel through Italy, where she became interested in the eighteenth century anatomist Clemente Susini, and the intersection between science and art. Graves is known as an artist who has created important work in nearly every medium, including sculpture, painting, printmaking, and installations. First known for sculptural work involving human and animal anatomy, Graves is also renowned for beautifully-colored abstract paintings (though even her abstract work has many references to the natural world).

Graves' subject matter is nearly as diverse as her range of media. Graves took inspiration from nature, from ancient art, and from all the nooks and crannies of the world of science, including lunar maps, which were the inspiration for this suite of prints. Graves worked with a number of seminal printmaking studios, including Graphicstudio in Florida, landfall in Chicago, Kenneth Tyler in New York, and many others. During the seventies, Graves based her works on a wide variety of maps and charts, including those of the ocean floor, the surface of Mars, and the moon.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

Interview with Emily Wasserman, Artforum, 10/70
"The Museum of natural History in Florence, Italy (where I lived and worked during 1966) contains the wax-works of an 18th-century anatomist, named Susini. What I saw there was a man whose total obsession was circumscribed within a very academic situation. That is, he was trying to define human anatomy in terms of drawings, and their reproduction in wax. The results were art, even in terms of that socio-historical period, although they were not recognized as such--they were not just copied cadavers. Visually, it's the most emphatic thing--the attempt to be rigorous about whatever the problem was, was much more thorough and complete than most artists usually are...the significance of this for me was that Susini had produced a complex body of work from a single point of origin."
Grace Glueck, New York Times, 11/5/99
"Cosmological imagery runs through the color prints of Nancy Graves (1940-1995), a sculptor and painter who was also adept at graphic expression. Working in a wide range of modes, from lithography to etching, aquatint and screenprint -- sometimes all in the same endeavor -- she made surreal fusions of motifs from sources like the Bible, classical sculpture, mythology, solar charts and insect, plant and animal life, combining the results with abstract passages and visual incidents of her own invention."