Reading, PA – The Reading Public Museum is proud to announce an engaging exhibition, Albrecht Dürer: Master Prints, featuring more than thirty woodblock prints and engravings by (or after) the German Renaissance master printmaker Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), on view from January 14 through May 7 in The Museum’s Works on Paper Gallery located on the Ground Floor.
Dürer was an extraordinary innovator who revolutionized the medium of printmaking in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century. Trained as a goldsmith, the painter, etcher and draftsman was praised for the remarkable compositional complexity and high level of naturalism he brought to his works. Dürer established an international reputation for his remarkable skills in printmaking (woodblock prints and engravings), which he had single-handedly elevated to an independent art form.
Scott Schweigert, curator of art and civilization noted that, “visitors will have the unique opportunity to examine the artist’s extraordinary skills in a highly complicated medium.” He adds that “Dürer took prints from craft to fine art in the early years of the sixteenth century and received accolades from artists and patrons throughout Europe.”
Examples from his celebrated Small Woodcut Passion (1508-10), Life of the Virgin (1503-10), and the full set of sixteen prints from the Engraved Passion (1507-12) will be featured in the exhibition. Albrecht Dürer: Master Prints also includes several compositions by some of the artist’s most influential contemporaries and predecessors, Albrecht Altdorfer and Martin Schongauer, among others. All of the works in the exhibition are drawn from RPM’s permanent collection of works on paper. Many of the prints entered The Museum’s collection in the 1930s through the 1970s and form a wonderful sampling of the artist’s body of work.
