BORCH Editions
Copenhagen
BORCH Editions was founded in Copenhagen in 1979 and is today considered one of the world’s leading producers and publishers of original prints.
The printmaking, always done in-house, is a close collaborative process between the artists, founder and master printer Niels Borch Jensen, and his team of printers. The collaborations often continue over many years, allowing the artists to build up a comprehensive body of printed work that explores the various aspects of the medium and ties in closely with their oeuvre.
Featured artists
Andreas Eriksson
A fundamental fascination with nature and the landscape forms the basis of Andreas Eriksson’s practice. His work is often based on everyday phenomena and the surrounding scenery of his home in Sweden. Eriksson’s poetic translations of his natural environment are created in a variety of media including painting, photography, sculpture, tapestry, installation and printmaking.
A patchwork of shapes coalesces in Andreas Eriksson’s etching Skimmer. It bears his painterly signature of working on the border between figuration and abstraction. The individual colour fields can be read as geological forms, patches of grass, bushes, or trees; the overall composition evokes a sense of the landscape. Like in his paintings, Eriksson’s choice of colours radiates intention. Nevertheless, the etching’s colour palette is surprising, ranging from soft, muted pastel shades to strikingly bright, almost neon-like tones.
For Skimmer, Andreas Eriksson has further developed a sandblasting drypoint technique, which he had first experimented with for his print Risberg, 2022. The tonal patchwork of shapes in Skimmer was created by sandblasting the copper plates through specially made stencils. A variety of particles was used in the sandblasting process to create different indentations in the plates: sand resulted in smooth, grainy surfaces, whereas gravel left a coarse, stipple texture. The final etching is composed from the five individually sandblasted plates printed on top of one another, so that the different shapes meet and overlap.
Andreas Eriksson, born in 1975 in Björsäter, Sweden, lives and works in Medelplana, Sweden. Eriksson has been collaborating with BORCH Editions since 2021.
Andreas Eriksson, 'Skimmer'. Courtesy of the gallery and the artist.
Andreas Eriksson, Process image. Courtesy of the gallery and the artist.
Andreas Eriksson, Artist portrait. Courtesy of the gallery and the artist.
Ann Lislegaard
For Ann Lislegaard, science fiction literature and technical innovation are tools to reflect on our present. Working in a variety of media ranging from single-channel videos to immersive installations and monumental public sculptures, Lislegaard employs cutting-edge technology to reflect on topical discourses like climate change, animal extinction, or feminism. Often associated with the New Materialism discourse, she frequently transfers digitally created content into physical matter.
The owl staring out of the image in Ann Lislegaard’s photogravure Animoid appears at once hyper-realistic and artificial. In fact, it is not a depiction of an existing animal, but an image generated by Artificial Intelligence. Lislegaard created the motif with the help of AI language models. Using text, she prompted the software to generate an image. Instead of presenting BORCH Editions’ printmaking studio with a final version of this image, she kept adjusting it during her exchange with the master printers, discussing different versions and integrating their feedback into later versions. During this process, the demands on the system became increasingly complex, until, unable to process the large amount of information, it created glitches and visual imperfections.
The interaction between AI and traditional craftsmanship, with Lislegaard as the mediator, formed the conceptual basis of the project. Instead of simply executing a digitally conceived image in a classic intaglio printing process, she decided to consider the physical realization of the digital image into her creative process from the very beginning. She thus facilitated a feedback-loop between present and past, between disembodied intelligence and physical craftsmanship, between the elusive concept of creativity and its physical manifestation.
Ann Lislegaard was born in Tønsberg, Norway, in 1962 and lives and works in Copenhagen. She has been collaborating with BORCH Editions since 2023.
Ann Lislegaard, 'Animoid'. Courtesy of the gallery and the artist.
Ann Lislegaard, Process. Courtesy of the gallery and the artist.
Ann Lislegaard, Portrait of the artist. Courtesy of the gallery and the artist.
