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When does a work of art achieve aesthetic resolution, and when does it fall short? Artists, collectors, and theorists since the Renaissance have regarded this question as both problematic and central to understanding the artistic endeavor. For reasons inherent in the medium, prints claim a special place in this history. Over the course of several centuries, artists were increasingly likely to retain and distribute prints at various stages in their making. Experiments with differing states and specially tailored impressions encouraged a fascination with degrees of finish in printmaking that challenged the very idea of aesthetic completion.
What follows is a chronicle of the complex workings of the artistic imagination revealed through the unfinished print and the changing estimation of artistic process that it provoked. There are many different ways to define incompleteness in a print. This exhibition explores only some of them, as seen by the following themes and highlights from the exhibition.
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