New Ground: Jacob Samuel and Contemporary Etching

by Esther Adler, Mona Hatoum, Cristina Iglesias, Shio Kusaka, Rita McBride, Josiah McElheny, Mathew Monahan, Meredith Monk, Gabriel Orozco, Gert and Uwe Tobias

An exhibition catalogue that features the work of master printer and publisher Jacob Samuel (American, b. 1951), and highlights his collaborations with contemporary artists Including Mona Hatoum, Rebecca Horn, Jannis Kounellis, Wangechi Mutu, Barry McGee, and Christopher Wool.

Over the course of four decades, the Los Angeles-based master printer and publisher Jacob Samuel collaborated with some of the most influential artists of the twentieth and twenty-first century-including painters, sculptors, photographers, performance artists, and musicians-to make etchings, a medium grounded in techniques more than five centuries old. Through a traditional but maximally flexible approach, he was driven to prove that etching could be a successful contemporary medium, and the breadth, variety, and creativity of the works he published is evidence of his success in making old master printmaking relevant to artists today. Published in conjunction with an exhibition that draws from his catalogue of more than 70 projects, New Ground presents select works by a diverse range of artists, including Mona Hatoum, Rebecca Horn, Jannis Kounellis, Barry McGee, Wangechi Mutu, and Christopher Wool. The richly illustrated catalogue features an essay by curator Esther Adler, interviews with thirteen of the artists Samuel worked with, and an illustrated list of the projects published by Edition Jacob Samuel in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art.