Screenprint, varnish and flock fibre on paper
Tate Collection
Works with images
General Collection
Collection
Privacy Plots
<a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/ivor-abrahams-622" aria-label="More by Ivor Abrahams" data-gtm-name="header_link_artist" data-gtm-destination="page--artist">Ivor Abrahams</a>
Privacy Plots IV Gate Post and Hedge
Presented by Evelyne Abrahams, the artist's wife 1986
architecture
emotions, concepts and ideas
formal qualities
garden
garden structures
gate
hedge
lawn
photographic
plants and flowers
townscapes / man-made features
paper print screenprint varnish flock fibre
5 July 2014 – 5 July 2015
2015-07-05
5 July 2014 – 5 July 2015
2015-07-05
2014-07-05
Tate Liverpool (Liverpool, UK)
http://www.tate.org.uk/liverpool/
2014-07-05
Liverpool Biennial
Collection based display
Privacy Plots IV: Gate Post and Hedge
image: 355 × 603 mm
Presented by Evelyne Abrahams, the artist's wife 1986
<p><b>Group of ninety-eight screenprints, lithographs and etchings</b>, various sizes [<a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/abrahams-garden-emblems-i-p11099" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>P11099</span></a>-<a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/abrahams-nereids-ii-p11196" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>P11196</span></a>; incomplete]
<br/>
<br/>Presented by Evelyne Abrahams, the artist's wife 1986</p>
<p>This group of <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/p/print" title="Glossary definition for 'Print'"><span>prints</span></a> was bequeathed to Evelyne Abrahams by the artist's parents, Harry and Rachel Abrahams, on the understanding that she would present it to the Tate Gallery on their behalf. It represents the greater part of the artist's printmaking to date. Other works by Abrahams in the collection are a <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/s/sculpture" title="Glossary definition for 'Sculpture'"><span>sculpture</span></a> entitled ‘Lady in a Niche’, 1973 (<a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/abrahams-lady-in-niche-t03369" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>T03369</span></a>), a work on <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/p/paper" title="Glossary definition for 'Paper'"><span>paper</span></a> entitled ‘Winter Sundial’, 1975 (<a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/abrahams-winter-sundial-t02330" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>T02330</span></a>), and a small number of prints: ‘The Garden Suite’, 1970 (<a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/abrahams-garden-suite-i-p04001" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>P04001</span></a>-<a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/abrahams-garden-suite-v-p04005" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>P04005</span></a>), ‘Sundial I (Summer)’, 1975 (<a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/abrahams-sundial-i-summer-p07384" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>P07384</span></a>) and ‘Untitled’ [from the artist's book <i>Oxford Gardens: A Sketchbook</i>], 1977 (<a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/abrahams-untitled-from-the-book-oxford-gardens-a-sketchbook-by-ivor-abrahams-p08150" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>P08150</span></a>).</p>
<p>Abrahams is primarily a sculptor, and many of his prints relate to particular sculptures. In the period 1967–79 Abrahams focused on garden imagery, exploring the relationship between art, artifice and nature. Many of the images used in early prints were based on small, relatively poor quality <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/p/photograph" title="Glossary definition for 'Photograph'"><span>photographs</span></a> of gardens reproduced in gardening magazines, such as the weekly <i>Amateur Gardening</i> and <i>Popular Gardening</i>, or, less frequently, better quality illustrations found in the series of volumes on gardens published by Country Life in the 1920s. This use of second-hand source material gives much of his printed output a <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/c/conceptual-art" title="Glossary definition for 'Conceptual art'"><span>conceptual</span></a> quality, and links his work to <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/p/pop-art" title="Glossary definition for 'Pop art'"><span>Pop art</span></a>. Abrahams has presented a large amount of source material relating to his printmaking of this period, including magazine clippings, photographs and sketches and acetate stencils, to the Tate Gallery Archive (TGA 8315).</p>
<p>The critical and commercial success of ‘The Garden Suite’ (<span>P04001</span>-P040054), published in 1970, helped establish Abrahams' name internationally, and in the following decade he went on to produce a significant body of prints, making approximately one print a month. The dealer Bernard Jacobson published many of his portfolios, and the Mayor Gallery organised a series of touring shows of prints and sculptures. In this period Abrahams was based in London, working at a studio in Leonard Street, EC2, from 1969 to 1982, and at the A &amp; A Foundry in Bow from 1982 to 1992, with a second studio at Butler's Wharf from 1974 to 1979.</p>
<p>In 1979 Abrahams abandoned the garden theme for which he had become well known and focused instead on water-based imagery, using bathers and nymphs which were inspired in part by the landscape, myths and folk customs associated with the South of France. Abrahams and his French wife bought a home in Pézenas, in the Languedoc, in 1973, where he used the cellar as a studio. In 1988 they bought a house in the small village, Castelnau de Guers, in the same region, and have lived there on a full-time basis since 1992.</p>
<p>Unless otherwise stated, all quotations by the artist in the following entries are taken from a taped interview with the compiler held on 18 August 1994. The entries have been approved by the artist.</p>
<p>[from]<b> Privacy Plots</b> 1970 [<a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/abrahams-privacy-plots-i-brick-wall-p11101" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>P11101</span></a>-<a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/abrahams-privacy-plots-v-hedge-and-street-p11105" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>P11105</span></a>]
<br/>
<br/>Suite of five screenprints with flock fibre on Crisbrook wove paper, various sizes; printed by Christopher Betambeau at Advanced Graphics and published by Bernard Jacobson Ltd in an edition of 75 plus 10 sets of artist's proofs of which this is one
<br/><i>Repr:</i> <i>Ivor Abrahams: Environments, Skulpturen, Zeichnungen, Komplette Graphiken</i>, exh. cat., Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne 1973, pp.84–5</p>
<p>According to the artist, ‘Privacy Plots’ was made six or seven months after a set of <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/s/screenprint" title="Glossary definition for 'Screenprint'"><span>screenprints</span></a> entitled ‘Garden Suite’ (<span>P04001</span>-<span>P04005</span>). The earlier suite, which was printed at Kelpra Studio and published in February 1970, featured elements which were to become recurring motifs in Abrahams' work of the 1970s: topiary, garden fences, hedges and curving paths. The suite had been well received, and ‘Privacy Plots’ was intended to quickly follow up this success.</p>
<p>Abrahams began to flock his sculptures in 1970 (see, for example, ‘Small Rockery’, 1970, repr. Cologne exh. cat., 1973, p.31 in col.), and wanted to incorporate this textural effect in his prints. In conversation with the compiler he explained that this was not something he could have attempted with the master printer Chris Prater at Kelpra Studio:</p>
<p>I moved over to Betambeau because a lot of the people who worked for Chris Prater opened up their own shop with the help of Eduardo Paolozzi who set them up. They were obviously a lot more experimental. Prater would never have undertaken a job like this because it was a completely new technique that had never been applied to screenprinting before. Advanced Graphics were very keen to do this, and we pitched in and did it.</p>
<p>In ‘Autobiography’ (<i>Ivor Abrahams</i>, exh. cat., Bernard Jacobson 1994, p.96), Abrahams described Betambeau as a ‘wonderful screen printer, completely open, for whom nothing is too much trouble. The best person I have known with mixing and matching colours’.</p>
<p>A description of the electrostatic flocking process is given in the Cologne catalogue (p.80):</p>
<p>Adhesive is applied over the surface to be flocked. Flock fibres are fed into a gridded hopper and are pushed towards the wire grid by means of a revolving paddle which is turned by compressed air. The fibres are then subjected to an electrostatic charge causing them to shoot out through the grid in thousands of individual particles.
<br/>The single fibres embed themselves in the adhesive standing up on end, creating a fibrous, piled surface like a carpet.
<br/>The fibres are precision cut in Switzerland and are between a quarter and three millimetres in length. Three grids are available for the electrostatic flocker: fine, medium and coarse. By varying the grid size with the flock millimetre ( 1/4,  1/2, 1, 2, and 3) considerable textural variety is created.</p>
<p>To add areas of flocking to the ‘Privacy Plot’ prints, a stencil was designed to print adhesive rather than <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/i/ink" title="Glossary definition for 'Ink'"><span>ink</span></a>, and the flock was applied from a gun. Abrahams himself bought the ready-dyed fibres from a supplier in Switzerland.</p>
<p>Each of the screenprints is based on a photographic image. The artist cannot remember the particular sources he used but in conversation with the compiler said that the images were probably taken from gardening magazines. The images were rephotographed by a professional photographer employed by the printer, enlarged and then worked upon by the artist in collaboration with Chris Betambeau before being used to make a photostencil. In most cases, the source image was a poor quality, <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/m/monochrome" title="Glossary definition for 'Monochrome'"><span>monochrome</span></a> image with little detail. In conversation the artist stressed that, in the making of the stencils, very little of the original image remained: the photographs provided the idea for the <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/c/composition" title="Glossary definition for 'Composition'"><span>composition</span></a> and the basic outline shapes. The contrast between the photographic and hand-drawn elements in the prints helps create a visual tension, while the hot colours favoured by the artist underscores the artificial or contrived nature of the images.</p>
<p>In an article written in 1971 Joseph Mashek saw in this suite of prints and in Abrahams' contemporary sculptural work a partly satirical exposure of the stylistic underpinnings of a still current concept of gardening:</p>
<p>Like the neatly clipped, slightly chilling ‘good neighbour’ hedges in ‘Privacy Plots’ (his recent suite of prints) and like the mysterious postcard-deadpan prints of bulging bourgeois herbage executed earlier [‘Garden Suite’], Abrahams' new sculpture concerns itself with the special style of gardening called the ‘gardenesque’. Successor to simpler, merely ‘picturesque’, types, this was an overstuffed, Biedermeier, gaudily massed and raucously colored approach to gardening whose invention and development was the responsibility of the Victorian age ... It is no accident that Abrahams' own reading in the literature of garden art centers on the Victorian period, on John Claudius Loudon's ‘The Ladies’ Companion to the Flower Garden', of 1834, and other works of that order. This edges on Pop sensibility in a curious way, by exposing the vulgarity of assumed good taste and revealing it as style. The local governments, commercial firms, and suburban bourgeoisie, thinking that they know perfectly well how gardens tastefully ought to look, are caught with their aesthetic pants down. Like true Pop, it isn't mere satire either, and with all serious gardening it shares a sense of being a journey into a private world.</p>
<p align="right">(‘In the Gardens of the Mind’, <i>Arts Magazine</i>,
<br/>vol.45, no.4, Feb. 1971, p.31)</p>
<p>Mashek (p.33) pointed to a certain ambivalence in Abrahams' images of suburbia. ‘There is ... a post-Pop tendency at work, as if these harmlessly inane visions of a suburban Arcady were for us as observing outsiders beyond criticism. They seem like they could have been built by people who had terrible taste but who were nevertheless close friends’. And yet, at the same time, he wrote, Abrahams' images often suggested a threatening or lonely environment.</p>
<p><a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/abrahams-privacy-plots-iv-gate-post-and-hedge-p11104" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>P11104</span></a> <b>Privacy Plots IV: Gate Post and Hedge </b>1970
<br/>Screenprint, varnish and flock fibre 355 × 603 (14 × 23 3/4) on Crisbrook wove paper 571 × 785 (22 1/2 × 30 7/8)</p>
<p>Inscribed ‘Ivor Abrahams 70’ below image b.r. and ‘Artists Proof’ below image b.l.</p>
<p><i>Lit:</i> Cologne exh. cat., 1973, p.84, fig.13 (unspecified impression, wrongly identified as ‘Brick Wall’)</p>
<p>This depicts a brightly coloured varnished brick post, made up of largely yellow, orange and brown bricks with white mortar, and a green flocked hedge. While the post was printed from hand-cut stencils, the presence of half-<a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/t/tone" title="Glossary definition for 'Tone'"><span>tone</span></a> dots in the green and purple areas of lawn, as in the distant shrubbery, indicates the photographic origins of the image as a whole. The source image for <span>P11104</span> was a small black and white illustration, measuring 57 × 97 mm, which had been clipped by Abrahams from a con-temporary gardening magazine and stuck on a piece of lined paper with no accompanying information (presented by the artist to the Tate Gallery Archive in 1986, TGA 8315). In conversation Abrahams stressed that the type of photographic illustrations he used provided very little detail, allowing him to produce sometimes quite <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/a/abstract-art" title="Glossary definition for 'Abstract art'"><span>abstract</span></a> images. In regard to the background area in this print, he said, ‘You can see that there is no attention to realistic detail whatsoever. There is just allusion to certain things’. He continued, ‘I made the decision at the time that that [the degree of <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/r/realism" title="Glossary definition for 'Realism'"><span>realism</span></a>] was quite enough - that that was enough to describe the pathway and that was enough to describe the lawn ... My basic interest was in the flocking, so other areas would be slightly neglected’. The Cologne catalogue describes the work as having required seventeen printings and two flockings.</p>
<p><b>Published in:</b>
<br/><i>Tate Gallery: Illustrated Catalogue of Acquisitions</i> <i>1986-88</i>, London 1996
<br/></p>

Catalogue entry
2004-10-13T00:00:00
catalogue-entry
CATALOGUE_ENTRY
architecture emotions, concepts and ideas formal qualities garden garden structures gate hedge lawn photographic plants and flowers townscapes / man-made features