New Ground: Jacob Samuel and Contemporary Etching

A cornucopia of etchings by artists from Mona Hatoum to Wangechi Mutu--from the studio of the great American master printer

Over the course of four decades, master printer and publisher Jacob Samuel (born 1951) collaborated with some of the most influential artists of the 20th and 21st centuries--including painters, sculptors, photographers, performance artists and musicians--to make etchings, a medium grounded in techniques more than five centuries old. Through a traditional but maximally flexible approach, he was driven to prove that etching could be a successful contemporary medium, and the breadth, variety and creativity in the works he published is evidence of his success in making old master printmaking relevant to artists today.
Published for an exhibition that draws from Samuel’s catalog of more than 70 projects, New Ground presents select works by a diverse range of artists, including Mona Hatoum, Rebecca Horn, Jannis Kounellis, Barry McGee, Wangechi Mutu and Christopher Wool. The richly illustrated catalog features an essay by curator Esther Adler, interviews with 13 of the artists Samuel has worked with and a checklist detailing every project published by Edition Jacob Samuel in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art.