Saturday 20 September, 11am BOOK PLACE
We are excited to announce that Messums West will be exhibiting an exceptionally rare bound copy of Elisabeth Frink’s celebrated Canterbury Tales etchings. The gallery would like to invite patrons to a talk about the Canterbury Tales and Frink’s graphic work more widely by curator Wilfrid Wright on Saturday 20 September.
Alongside the Canterbury Tales we would like to present other graphic works, and are inviting anyone with works on paper by Frink to get in touch with a view to contributing to an exhibition of the artist’s drawings and prints.
Although best known for her sculpture, Frink was a prolific printmaker, and her graphic work is widely considered some of her most accomplished. In 1970 she began to create a series of etchings on the theme of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Beginning with medieval beast tales taken over by Chaucer, Frink then went on to create 19 prints illustrating Chaucer’s stories in signed editions of 50. A separate edition was bound with the text in two signed and numbered folios, of which the folio presented by Messums is No. B.52. Frink treated the Canterbury Tales with a wit that matched Chaucer’s text and revelled in the experimental environment of the printmaker’s atelier, creating an astonishingly bold and confident series of works that are one of the great suites of prints of the 20th century.
There are currently four exceptional sculptures by Elisabeth Frink on view in the Tithe Barn at Messums West – come and discover the work of this pre-eminent figure in 20th century sculpture.
