Small But Mighty showcases all forms of printmaking and highlights the powerful, ambitious and impressive nature of works created on a small scale.
This year's Guest Curator is John Harle OBE, Saxophonist, Composer and Producer and he has chosen a fabulous selection of over 200 works in printmaking from the many submissions received from printmakers all over the world in response to the open call to artists.
A FEW WORDS FROM OUR GUEST SELECTOR JOHN HARLE
This year, the Small But Mighty exhibition honours extraordinary printmaking talent once again, but can also celebrate that from April 2026, the Society will now be known as the Royal Society of Printmakers after the supplemental Charter given to it by King Charles III.
This is an important distinction that gives autonomy to original printmaking, and one which clarifies that printmaking doesn't need to imitate painting to become serious art.
Although one might argue that this has come around a hundred years too late (after the first works of El Lizzitsky, László Moholy-Nagy and John Heartfield for example,) it clearly spells out the fact that printmaking is (and always has been) a fine art.
Printmaking traditionally occupied an awkward position in the institutional hierarchy of Western art: painting and sculpture were treated as autonomous "fine arts," whereas printmaking could be associated with reproduction, illustration, montage, copying, commercial processes and technical craft. But in the line of Walter Benjamin and the Bauhaus to John Berger's view that printmaking "democratises" the image, the vitality of printmaking comes from its capacity to absorb new technologies and then be seen by all.
As a musician, there is an intriguing parallel here with Stravinsky, where collage, montage, copying and the recontextualisation of pre-existing material produced works that are undeniably at the zenith of musical achievement - the source image functions like quotation or sampling; montage is composition, and printing is the process through which the assembled material acquires a new formal identity. The artistic act resides not necessarily in inventing every element but in the selection, collision, transformation and context of the found musical objects. Even copying itself can become a creative operation - fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto said: "Start copying what you love. Copy, copy, copy, copy. At the end of the copy you will find yourself"
At the Small But Mighty exhibition you will see the work of printmakers who have "found themselves" and represent the pinnacle of achievement in all these challenges, so please come along!
John Harle
WITH THANKS TO OUR EXHIBITION PRIZEGIVERS
