Research project Scandinavian Women Artists at Atelier 17. Artistic Practices, Collective Processes, and Transnational Networks, 1950–1970
This project examines the printmaking workshop Atelier 17, with particular emphasis on the studio as a space for Scandinavian women artists between 1950 and 1970.
Photos from Atelier 17, Paris, 1968.
Founded in Paris in 1927, Atelier 17 became a pivotal site for the development of modern printmaking. Techniques such as automatic drawing using dry point on copper plates generated spontaneous and surreal etchings and engravings, while simultaneous colour printing through viscosity printing introduced new, painterly possibilities of expression. The workshop functioned as an interdisciplinary meeting place for artists, writers, and poets. By fostering collaboration between established practitioners and less experienced participants, it developed working methods centred on process and the exchange of knowledge. Many of the artists involved were women who, in various ways, contributed to the development of postwar abstract modernism, Surrealism, and Expressionism. Several of them shared a commitment to challenging established conventions of printmaking in terms of style, scale, and technique, thereby paving the way for new aesthetic expressions through their etchings, engravings, and woodcuts.
Brita Molin, Louise (u.å.) Torrnål and Inger Sitter, No title (1968). Colour lithograph.
This project takes Atelier 17 as its point of departure as a site not only of graphic production but also as a central node for knowledge exchange and technical innovation within a transnational network of artistic, material, and institutional actors. Five women artists constitute the empirical foundation of the study: Brita Molin (1919–2008) and Joy Egnel (1920–2001) from Sweden; Inger Sitter (1929–2015) and Anne Breivik (1932–2012) from Norway; and Jette Thyssen (born 1933) from Denmark, all of whom were active at Atelier 17 in Paris between 1950 and 1970.
Brita Molin, Open Doors (1972). Embossing, intaglio printing.