Tina Modotti, a Linocut Reduction Print, Handmade and Hand-Printed by Tom retailer Callos. Limited Edition of 10 Prints.
This is a handmade hand-printed edition of only 10 prints of artist.
This is a handmade, hand-printed edition of only 10 prints of artist, photographer, and activist Tina Modotti. The medium is linocut --specifically, this is a 2 block print, where one block printed all the dark (black) color, the other being a reduction print containing the other colors. The image itself measures 8" x 10" but it is printed on 11" x 14" Strathmore art paper. Being that the print measures 11" x 14" it may be framed with off-the-shelf frame sizes, if framing costs are a factor.
The ink used is Caligo Oil-Based Safewash and Speedball oil relief ink. Of course, as these are handmade, each print contains some small variation in color, etc...from the other 9.
From https://www.moma.org/artists/4039
Tina Modotti
Italian, 1896–1942
Tina Modotti's photographs blend formal rigor with social awareness. The Italian-born artist immigrated to the United States when she was 16. She acted in plays and silent films, and worked as an artist's model during her first years in the country. In 1920 she met photographer Edward Weston, who mentored her and was a great influence on her subsequent work. By 1921 they had become lovers, and in 1923 they moved together to Mexico City, which had become a cosmopolitan center in the interwar years. There, cultural and political expatriates like Weston and Modotti, Sergei Eisenstein, and Leon Trotsky moved in bohemian circles with Mexican intellectuals and artists such as Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Modotti and Weston opened a portrait studio in the city.
With her camera, Modotti captured Mexico's sights and people. She took its folk art and landscapes as the starting points for her most abstract images. Telephone Wires, Mexico isolates taut stretches of wire against a pale sky, finding gridded linearity in the skyscape. Staircase and Stadium, Mexico City record repetitions of stairs and shadows, retailer creating complex images that push these architectural features toward abstraction.
Modotti's social concerns emerge in photographs such as Worker's Hands, a quiet celebration of a laborer's dignity. Mella's Typewriter reveals her leftist leanings and carries a subtle social heft. Modotti met Julio Antonio Mella, a Cuban revolutionary who was a hero among other Latin American radicals, in 1928, at a demonstration in Mexico City against the execution of the anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. The following year, Mella was assassinated as he walked home with Modotti by his side. Her photograph of his typewriter, his instrument for recording his beliefs, is a symbolic portrait of Mella's life and work, and an emblem of her own Communist sympathies—which ultimately led to her exile from Mexico in 1930.
Modotti eventually settled in Moscow, where she joined the Soviet Communist Party. She gave up photography completely in 1931 to dedicate herself to political work. When she died in 1942 from congestive heart failure, she left behind a small but intensely influential body of work that reflects her appreciation for the Mexican working class, filtered through the precise formal vocabulary of her photographic practice.