Kip Gresham | The Legacy of a Master Printmaker

Eames Fine Art Gallery

58 Bermondsey Street

London SE1 3UD

Eames Fine Art is delighted to announce an exhibition of works from the personal archives of master printmaker Kip Gresham (1951 - 2024). 

Kip Gresham worked with many of the most brilliant artists of the last 50 years - including Paula Rego, Elisabeth Frink, Peter Blake, John Hoyland, Gillian Ayres, Terry Frost, Eduardo Paolozzi and Patrick Caulfield. We are honoured to be working with his estate to exhibit a selection of printers' proofs from his personal archives. These works will be on show and for sale at the gallery this December and we hope visitors and collectors will join us in celebrating this master printmaker and his legacy. 

Kip was a modest man who asserted "the work is that of the artist, and my participation is secondary', and yet many of the foremost artists of his time would travel across the country, and indeed, when necessary across the world to book time to work with Kip in his studio. As Alan Bookbinder (Master of Downing College, Cambridge) adds, "While the end result is recognisably the artist's work, it could not be done without the master printmaker's skill and inventiveness."

Kip described the best of his collaborations with artists as a 'meeting of minds'. He noted that "Each coupling is unique from the outset. The project may start as a boxful of collage, a maquette, a written description, a mathematical structure or exist only as an intention or sensation, but when the artist arrives in the studio anything is possible; some things are more probable than others but anything is possible and the answer is 'yes'." 

There is a wonderful intensity and power to all the works we have selected for this exhibition.  Kip was genuinely excited by the possibility of colour and the many ways it could be mixed, applied, layered and structured. Some of the more complex prints he worked on could contain as many as 15 base layers, with stencils printed in more than 20 successive layers on top to build up the rich, complex design. He often said that he found something of this process instinctive, but I think perhaps this was an instinct that was enriched by hours and hours of dedication, experimentation and practice.