Grundstock

In Baseline, we have returned to our beginnings. The woodcut basic course at the Leipzig Academy of Fine Arts begins with a broad spectrum of expressive possibilities: simple shapes, black and white line cutting, grey values, contrasting areas. After a few weeks, the discipline of patience: re-cutting an early modern motif in hard wood. There is a wide range of templates that can be transferred to the printing block using a copying process.

The hard wood is slow and laborious to cut and the linear hatching runs completely counter to the characteristics of the flat medium. Once this task has been overcome, the woodcut loses much of its terror – and whoever then decides against meticulous precision in a small format can do that, "but not out of a lack of craftsmanship", according to Karl-Georg Hirsch, who as a former professor of woodcut used the same templates in the course over 50 years ago.

From this period, from 1971 to 2024, we have collected and reprinted a good 40 old course printing blocks – some forgotten in the workshop, some stowed away in the cellar for years; precisely recut or with small inventions added; finished plates and failed attempts; by later master woodcutters, but also by artists whose first foray into the medium was to remain their last; almost always without a recognisable personal style and precisely for this reason so fascinating.