Masters of Printmaking from Canada – Info for Press

P R O J E C T

“The Shifting Point: New Expressions in Canadian Printmaking” – this is the first part of the international Graphic Art Project “Lithuania – Canada”. After the exhibition of Canadian artists in Lithuania in 2025 at “Titanikas”, in 2026 we are planning an exhibition of Lithuanian graphic art in Canada.
“The second-largest country in the world, Canada boasts a population of forty-one million, 50 percent of whom are immigrants or children of immigrants. It is also a northern country, and temperatures can drop as low as -40 degrees Celsius in winter.
Since the nation’s founding in 1867, Canadian artists have drawn freely on their multicultural heritage while acknowledging the critical and market dominance of American art movements and competing “isms.”
After suffering the chaos of World War II, Eastern Europeans realized the portability of prints could provide a convenient format for the exchange of ideas across hardening borders. The visionary initiatives that gave birth to the first open-juried international print biennial in Ljubljana in 1955 soon inspired similar efforts in Kraków, New Delhi, Tokyo, and beyond.
These exhibitions enabled artists around the world to discover the diversity and depth of world graphic traditions, and their catalogues captured new trends and innovations as they developed.
The ensuing global proliferation of print biennials also showcased and encouraged new technological developments, including the integration of photomechanical extensions in etching, lithography, screen-printing, and even woodcut.
Relatively unhindered by tradition and marketing strategies, Canadian artists were quick to adopt new techniques and concepts. They became known for their hybrid works, which combine historical artisanal approaches with photomechanical and digital technology, creating surprising art that defies convention and categorization.
Most Canadian artists eschew the idea of a “technological imperative,” however, viewing printmaking as an opportunity to shift between the historical and the new, the deliberate and the spontaneous while gaining creative agility through the engagement of process as medium.
This exhibition showcases more than eighty works by eighteen multi–award-winning Canadian artists who range in age from thirty-three to eighty-four. From small-scale photogravures to large digital murals, the works address a wealth of themes, including our relationship to natural and manufactured environments; ancestral origins; loss and grief; language and perception; social chaos; pop, science fiction, advertising; and the philosophical and metaphysical.
Here, it is possible to witness a new vitality in Canadian art that is increasingly acknowledged to be part of a global shift, repositioning print-based works from the sidelines to the centre of our ever-evolving image culture.”
Prof. Emeritus Walter Jule, Canada