Draiflessen Collection
STORYTELLING. The Narrative Power of Printmaking
STUDY ROOM | October 15, 2023, to April 28, 2024

Draiflessen Collection
Georgstraße 18 | 49497 Mettingen
info@draiflessen.com | www.draiflessen.com

An Exhibition about the Narrative Power of Printmaking
This showcase exhibition delves into the fascinating world of printmaking, which kicked off a groundbreaking transformation in the fifteenth century with its novel way of disseminating images. Before this time, works of art such as altarpieces and paintings were usually only accessible to a privileged audience. With the advent of the new media of woodcut and copperplate engraving, images could suddenly be produced and distributed quickly, cheaply, and in large editions. The exhibition impressively shows how printmaking, with its unique narrative form, helped to make images and the stories they contain accessible to a broad public for the first time. It also shows that, with the new medium, what was depicted also changed.

Hidden Stories and Multilayered Allusions
While the artists were initially still strongly influenced by religion and therefore also rendered mainly religious motifs, profane everyday scenes were now increasingly pushing their way into the center of the picture. But what purpose did these secular pictures serve? Which zeitgeist is reflected in them? And how did the artists manage to convey to the contemporary viewer not only an image, but at the same time an entire story or message on just a few square centimeters of paper? In contrast to the viewers of that time, who naturally understood the multilayered allusions conveyed through pictorial language, today we often lack this knowing gaze. STORYTELLING therefore invites us to decipher the hidden stories in the depictions and thus to (re)discover answers to the above-mentioned questions.

Insight into Printmaking around 1500
The exhibition presents a variety of artistically impressive and inventive prints—which to this day remain both aesthetically pleasing and, in terms of narrative, highly captivating. STORYTELLING provides a glimpse into late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century printmaking, while purposefully directing the eye to experience contemporary messages and artistic expression in a new way.