Kate Petley Prints at Manneken Press
Manneken Press recently published eleven unique hand-colored prints by Kate Petley. These works were produced in October 2020, when COVID-19 restrictions made the artist’s planned trip to Manneken Press an impossibility.
Each project published by Manneken Press is an opportunity for an artist to create or adapt a visual idea into the print medium. Typically, the artist works side by side with the printer who assists in realizing the artist’s vision. In the summer of 2020 Kate Petley was to spend a week at Manneken Press working on a new series of monoprints, but the COVID-19 pandemic threw the plan into disarray. Health concerns made an in-person visit impossible, and we were faced with the choice to postpone or improvise. Undeterred, Petley suggested the idea of a remote collaboration as a solution to our dilemma.
At Manneken Press we revived and repurposed several of Petley’s vintage intaglio plates, printed a number of impressions from them in a variety of colors, and shipped the etchings to Kate in Colorado. There, in her own studio, she proceed to work on the group of prints as a related series, contemplating each one before altering and augmenting it. The process unfolded in much the same way that it would have at Manneken Press, but rather than using printing ink and a press Petley used stencils and acrylic paint. The eleven images are luminous and intriguing, with layered colors textured by the speckled effect of the sprayed paint that she applied with a mouth atomizer.
In the midst of the worsening pandemic, it felt very necessary to push forward with this project, and I’m so glad we did; it speaks to the importance of human connection in the face of enforced isolation, the persistence of creativity through times of stress and difficulty, and the determination to push through obstacles and find ways to create beauty and meaning.
-Jonathan Higgins, Director, Manneken Press.
About Kate Petley
Born in New York, Kate lives and works near Boulder, Colorado.
Collapsing the boundaries between sculpture, photography, and painting, Kate Petley reframes the history and meaning of the luminous surface. Her radiant surfaces contain experiential planes of color, light, and form. Manneken Press has published four monoprint projects by Kate Petley since 2013.
Petley has solo exhibitions in 2020 at VonLintel Gallery Los Angeles and Robischon Gallery in Denver. She will present a solo exhibition in 2021 at the University of Colorado Art Museum (CUAM), curated by Director Sandra Firmin. Additionally, Petley is the guest curator for a nine-artist exhibition for the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, also opening in 2021. Her work has been exhibited at MCA Denver, the Museum of South Texas, the Nicolaysen Museum, Fotofest Houston, the Martin Museum at Baylor University, Museum of the Southwest, the Arlington Museum of Art, and other institutions.
Petley has been featured in thirty solo exhibitions and has completed numerous public commissions and installations. She participated in PhotoIreland 2017 and is a Ucross Foundation Fellowship recipient. Awarded an NEA Rockefeller Foundation Grant, other residencies include the Mayer of Munich Glass studio in Germany and Platteforum Denver. Collections include the Museum of Texas Tech University, the City of Houston, Fidelity Investments Boston and Denver, Stanford University, Morgan Stanley San Francisco, the Federal Reserve Bank Kansas City, and the Polsinelli Collection.
About Manneken Press
Manneken Press LLC is an independent fine art press located in Bloomington, IL. Since 2000, Manneken Press has published limited edition etchings, relief prints, lithographs, and monotypes, portfolios and artist’s book by nationally recognized artists, and has recently expanded to offer drawings, photographs and sculpture.