Traditional techniques such as woodcut and linoleum cut, and the intaglio processes that comprise etching, drypoint, aquatint, and mezzotint, are represented by a range of artists including Georg Baselitz, Richard Bosman, Anselm Kiefer, and Joan Snyder working in the former techniques, and Luis Cruz Azaceta, Lucian Freud, and Brice Marden working in the latter. A particularly pervasive format during the last fifteen years was the multipart project, a series of prints linked by a common theme and published as a group. Among such works in the exhibition are those by Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, and Rosemarie Trockel. Examples of multiples, which lie somewhere between sculpture and the editioned print, include a variety of unusual objects, from Peggy Diggs's milk containers containing messages about domestic violence to Rirkrit Tiravanija's apron featuring a recipe for sausage. Themes examines several of the most significant issues treated in printmaking and in contemporary art generally over the last fifteen years.
Language serves as subject matter in a wide range of prints and illustrated books in the exhibition.
The related mediums of photography and printmaking have been combined in many recent projects for a variety of artistic purposes. Social and political issues that took on primary importance during this period apartheid, race and ethnicity, and especially AIDS were treated extensively through print mediums, which in many instances offered a way to bring art out of the galleries and into the public realm. Among the artists in the exhibition whose work communicates a strong social message are Elizabeth Catlett, Sue Coe, General Idea, Keith Haring, and Juan S nchez. The body became the focus of increased attention in contemporary printmaking, both in the Neo-Expressionist figuration of A. R. Penck and Susan Rothenberg and in the unromantic investigations of Louise Bourgeois and Annette Messager. Published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, it contains 160 pages and 152 illustrations, including 88 in full color.