Anne Desmet
Building without Barriers

Printmaker Anne Desmet (b. 1964, Liverpool) creates razor-sharp prints in which she plays with perspective and architecture. Like Escher, she excels in transformations and metamorphoses. She too created her first architectural work in Italy, and this had a lasting impact on her later urban landscapes. This autumn, Escher in The Palace will present the work of the acclaimed Desmet for the first time in the Netherlands, alongside that of one of her great sources of inspiration: M.C. Escher.

She could easily be called the ‘British Escher’, as Anne Desmet has been fascinated by themes of transformation and architecture from a young age, using them as the foundation for her prints and drawings. At art school (Ruskin School of Art, Oxford University), she learned etching, woodcutting, copper engraving, screen printing and lithography. Since then, wood engraving and lithography have become her favourite techniques. Winning the Lithography Prize of the Printmakers Council in London at the age of 23, followed by a Rome Scholarship, set the stage for her illustrious career. In Rome, she created her first architectural work, and after returning to England, urban landscapes also captured her attention. Like Escher, she is fascinated by the world around her, always with Italy in mind. Desmet became a renowned artist in Britain, where she has been appointed a ‘Royal Academician’, the third wood engraver ever to receive this title. She has received dozens of national and international awards and prizes, has had numerous solo exhibitions including museum shows in Italy, Russia and Brazil as well as various museums in England and Wales, and she has worked on many commissions both for museums and for private clients.

One of Anne Desmet’s major fascinations is showing how the past and present influence each other. For example, she often ‘builds’ modern cities on top of ruins. “I want to create a sense of the intertwining and passage of years of history – a kind of metamorphosis that is a dominant theme in my work,” she says. She literally and figuratively gives her prints multiple layers: apart from making relief prints in editions, she also creates collages by cutting, folding, tearing, recycling and combining fragments from her engravings and linocuts with other materials. These new images come to life both on paper and digitally. Her work connects past and present with landmarks like the Brooklyn Bridge and the Manhattan skyline in New York City and timeless iconic buildings like the British Museum in London. Her architectural works are also at the heart of her impressive kaleidoscopic patterns.

In addition to around forty prints by Desmet, the exhibition at Escher in The Palace will also feature a selection of sketchbooks, woodblocks and tools. The great strength of both artists is the way they construct their images using light emerging from the dark. The craftsmanship and precision of the two printmakers are clearly evident in their prints. The process of working on a woodblock is time-consuming and requires a great deal of patience. Creating a more complex work can take up to three months, and the result is always a revelation, even for the artist. “The white you see on the paper is what I engrave in the wood”, says Desmet. “That I can ‘carve’ light out of darkness is what I find most inspiring about creating wood engravings.”