Fifty: Fifty 30 Years of Drawings and Prints by Paul Croft RE TMP

12 November 2012 - 12 January 2013

Museum of Modern Art Wales, Machynlleth

Fifty: Fifty 30 Years of Drawings and Prints by Paul Croft was a major retrospective exhibition hosted by MOMA Wales, that featured drawings and prints made by the artist during the last thirty years.

Celebrating Croft's fiftieth birthday in 2013, this exhibition comprised of over 100 drawings and prints spanning thirty years, since he was a student at Edinburgh College of Art during the early 1980s. The exhibition featured several key works showing the development of a personal visual language, inspired in part by found objects, still life and a lifelong interest in the archaelogical and the etymological origin of letter forms, alphabets and lexicons.

The exhibition and accompanying catalogue traced this development from initial training and interest in object drawing and traditional still life and then focused upon the emergence of language in later works that derive from his interest in Japanese calligraphy, Hiragana and Kanji characters, the rock carvings and petroglyphs of the American Southwest to more recent series including 'Alphabets' and 'Les Animaux à Musée'.

Paul Croft, born 1963 in Belfast, trained at Edinburgh College of Art 1981-1986 and later qualified as a Master Printer from the world-renowned Tamarind Institute of Lithography in Albuquerque. Croft describes himself as having a tripartite role as artist-printmaker specialising in lithography, an educatorcurrently as Head of Printmaking at The School of Art in Aberystwyth and as a professional collaborating printer helping artists to make prints. During the last decade, such collaborations have occured with artists David Tress, Mary Lloyd Jones, Marcelle Hanselaar, Wuon Gean Ho, Stuart Pearson Wright and many others.

Croft has written two highly regarded books on Stone Lithography (2001) and Plate Lithography (2003) published by A&C Black Ltd London and in 2007 he curated the influential exhibition Stone: Plate: Grease: Water International Contemporary Lithography that opened at MOMA Wales and then toured to galleries throughout Wales, London and Belfast. He has helped curate several shows of work by Aberystwyth Printmakers and he himself has exhibited widely throughout the UK and abroad in USA, Japan, and Hong Kong. In 2008 Croft was elected as a full member of the Royal Society of Painter Printmakers in London.

Exhibition opening at MOMA Wales 10 November 2012

Opened by Richard Noyce