Harry van Kuyk - 8 lithographs (7 x signed) Book Nymph - eleventh bibliophile - 1996

8 Lithographs by Harry van Kuyk (7 of which are signed). Eleventh bibliophile private edition. Year: 1996. Number: 22/24.
Book dimensions: H52 x 34cm. Seven lithographs plus the colophon are hand signed by van Kruiningen. The first lithograph (in the front) is unsigned. The authenticity of the work offered is fully guaranteed. A certificate of authenticity can be emailed upon request.


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Even during his secondary school years, Harry van Kuyk apprenticed at a small printer in his hometown - this typifies his lasting passion for graphic technology and printing. He is trained at the Graphic School in Amsterdam. He then worked in the graphics industry for fifteen years, including at major Haarlem printers and publishers such as Boom-Ruygrok and Joh. Enschedé (as hand typesetter and foreman) and the Nijmegen magazine division of De Gelderlander (as designer and layout man). At the same time he draws, paints and photographs, makes graphics on a small scale and becomes skilled in graphic design. Privately, he carries out artistic and design assignments for companies, municipalities and private individuals.

In 1965 he established himself as an independent graphic artist in Bemmel, near Nijmegen. He participates in regional exhibitions with figurative graphics and drawings, and comes into contact with painters, sculptors and graphic artists such as Theo Elfrink, Klaas Gubbels, Rob Terwindt, Oscar Goedhart, Ed van Teeseling and the artist-critic Maarten Beks. In the meantime, he experiments extensively with graphic techniques.

In 1969 he succeeded in producing prints with extreme relief (up to 20 millimeters) on special thick rag paper. Initially he calls them 'prägedruk' (after the German for blind printing), a common concept in modern graphics at the time. However, due to a number of essential technical differences, he quickly and definitively speaks of 'relief printing'.

Embossing (two rectangles per square, 6 layers x 6 rows)
1970
paper
65 × 50 cm (passe-partout size)
edition 7

His white, geometric-abstract prints, characterized by light and shadow, have been a great success since 1970. They are compared with the white wall reliefs and objects by Ad Dekkers and Nul artist Jan Schoonhoven. 'The most obvious interpretation of Harry van Kuyk's sheets links them to Nul,' wrote art critic Lambert Tegenbosch in 1972. 'There is the same preference for white. There is often some seriality. There is the picturesquely conceived geometry. There is an element of mystery that is generated by emptiness.'[2] In the early 1970s, artists such as Schoonhoven and Shlomo Koren came up with their own embossed variants of white, geometric series.

In 1971, supported by a substantial government subsidy, Van Kuyk built his large relief printing press Aldus Manutius . He prints coherent series on it in large format with specific themes: geometry, typography, the golden ratio. He organizes the relief prints in cassettes, boxes and artist's books, such as Aldus Manutius (1971), Variations on the Sectio Aurea (1972), Groot Abecedarium (1973), Tangram (1975) and Landscape (1980). He provides the publications with a textbook or text pages with introductions and essays by art experts and journalists (Lambert Tegenbosch, GW Ovink, Joop Eilander, Wim Wennekes) or with poetry (by Hans Sternsdorff – known as Hans Ruf jr. –, Hans Bouma). He also produces numerous loose relief prints with geometric, lyrical-abstract and figurative shapes. The editions are small: seven, ten or twenty copies, exceptionally sixty. Production is time-consuming. He executed a number of geometric relief prints on his own initiative as large white wall reliefs in wood (1973, 1975).

More than a hundred exhibitions will follow at home and abroad (Amsterdam, Rotterdam, London, New York). Some sales exhibitions sell out in just a few weeks. National and international museums acquire his work. Groot Abecedarium was awarded silver at the Third International Graphics Biennale in Frechen (West Germany) in 1974. He moves his studio to Nijmegen. In 1980-1981 he was a guest critic of contemporary art for De Gelderlander .

After a five-month journey through Africa (1982-1983) he settled in Ooij, outside Nijmegen. His production decreases, as do his exhibitions, but new relief print editions and artist books appear, including Bodoni Initiales (1993), Erografica (1995) and Novanu (2006). He produces large, minimalist white wall reliefs in acrylic or wood on commission, including for the town hall in Zevenaar (1985).

From the 1990s onwards he has devoted himself to more classical graphic forms such as drypoint (nudes), and to drawings, gouaches and pastels (nudes, landscapes). He writes essays and poetry for his art publications. He self-publishes about ten collections of stories, travel reports and aphorisms. In 2007 he was appointed Knight in the Order of Orange-Nassau. He died a year later in Nijmegen.

Relief print from Large Abecedarium (letter K)
1973
paper
65 × 50 cm (top size)
edition of 60 relief print

A relief print by Van Kuyk is often mistaken for an (extreme) blind print. Wrongly, because the techniques differ. A blind print is an inkless print with some relief (up to a few millimeters), made on a platen press (for relief printing) or an etching press (for intaglio printing). With a platen press, two plates (platen) hit each other briefly and forcefully, so that the printing form leaves a relief in the applied paper. With an etching press, the printing form together with the paper is rotated smoothly and horizontally under a roller, so that the relief of the printing form is pressed into the paper.

A relief print is an (inkless) print with an extreme relief (5 to 20 millimeters), made on a relief printing press (embossing press) using a mold and a counter mold (felt mats). A relief print combines letterpress and intaglio printing: the relief is both in and on the paper. A relief printing press works vertically: the printing form (a manually assembled mold with elements of zinc, steel or aluminum), a sheet of moist, thick, long-fiber paper and some felt mats are stacked between two plates (stamps). The relief print is formed under high hydraulic pressure (up to 60 tons), with continuous heating (up to 70 °C), for one to two hours. The relief printing mold is constructed so precisely, with ascending and descending segments, that the print paper does not tear. A relief print is the result of a delicate balance between mould, choice of paper, pressure, temperature and time.

Van Kuyk's process does not arise from embossing, but from stereotypy. This is an early twentieth century, widely used reproduction technique in the printing industry. Stereotype (stereos = solid; typos = stamp, letter) is the method by which a very fine mirror-image copy of a page of lead type is made in special cardboard, under vertical, hydraulic pressure, on a heated embossing press. The cardboard printing form (mold) is then cast in lead again, so that a new printable page ('stype', in printers' jargon) is created that is identical to the original lead type. In this way, exact copies of the same page can be placed on different presses simultaneously, achieving higher print runs in a shorter time - profitable when printing newspapers, magazines and best-selling books. Around 1960 the stereotype disappeared with the rise of offset printing; offset makes lead printing unnecessary and uses photography as a reproduction technique.

Stereotype: type and mirror-image copy (mold)
Reclam-Verlag, Leipzig
1953
Photo Roger and Renate Rössing
Deutsche Fotothek

Van Kuyk knew the stereotype inside out through his years of work in large commercial printing companies. As a pioneer, he translated the technique into graphic art in 1969. In the 1970s, several artists (Klaus van de Locht, Torkel Dahlstedt) mastered the process in his studio, to the press. But while embossing and other relief printmaking have remained popular, embossing is rarely encountered due to the specialist skills involved.