From lines to dots and beyond: Anne Heyvaert in conversation with Sylvie Karier, around her exhibition “I’ll be back” at Fyns Grafiske Værksted, Denmark. 7/02 – 3/03/2020

Abstract

For her third exhibition, at Fyns Grafiske Værksted, the Danish print workshop located in Odense, Sylvie Karier exhibited a selection of works, engravings and monotypes created between two separate periods of almost 20 years. The selection demonstrated a great cohesion and showed how she continued to make works along formal and technical constraints. Through a conversation with the artist, Anne Heyvaert explores how Sylvie balances traditional values of printmaking of etching and aquatint with a larger sense of graphic potentials, from using the line to a mass of dots and intensely velvety solid areas. Sylvie shows how her predominantly black prints are a play between figure and ground, and exploit aspects of printmaking such as reduction, repetition and progression. Anne Heyvaert points out how Sylvie Karier eventually breaks the limits of the discipline, by exploring the materiality of inks and paper using monotypes and stitching.