Art Makes Lives Better

Birgit Skiöld (1923-1982), born in Sweden, was a modernist printmaker who lived and worked in Britain from 1948 onwards. She ran the highly successful Print Workshop, London, which was established in 1958 and operated until 1983. The Print Workshop became a destination for international artists needing open access to a professional printmaking studio. It was the very first of its kind in the UK and became very popular with such artists as David Hockney, Eduardo Paolozzi and Victor Pasmore.

Skiöld saw herself as a painter-printmaker, but she is best known for her inventive approaches to etching and lithography, her use of blind-embossing and the application of photographic processes to her single prints and bookworks. She was an advocate for the artist’s print in all its manifestations. She seized hold of new technologies and the opportunities these represented in the changing modernist era, as printmaking underwent a transformation in the 1960s and 1970s, and became an important medium for the avant-garde.

Her life is commemorated in an award for innovating printmaking, the international Grand Prize for Printmaking. Students at The Royal College of Art, Central School of Art and Chelsea School of Art, amongst others, benefitted from her printmaking lectures, and she taught workshops in universities in the USA, Sweden and Japan before her death in 1982. The Victoria & Albert Museum acquired the Birgit Skiöld Archive in 1997.

Artwork in fair condition. Some marks to edges of canvas from handling.