Abstraction, Landscape, and Contemporary Woodcut

ion, Landscape, and Contemporary Woodcut Chair Endi Poskovic Artist and Professor of Art and Design Penny W. Stamps School of Art and Design, University of Michigan The origin of modern abstraction may be rooted in the 19th-century Romantic landscape tradition of Northern Europe; a premise set forth by renowned American art historian and professor Robert Rosenblum (1927-2006) in the early 1970s. This panel invites artists and makers, critical thinkers and art historians interested in expanding the conversation about the heritage of modern abstraction and whose creative and scholarly research explore the evolution of the 19th-century ideal into the vernacular of contemporary woodcut print. Works by and about contemporary print artists who via woodcut explore memory, sublime, deity, transformation, revival, intimations of mortality, as well as ideas about nationality, displacement, and reconciliation amongst others are welcome. The presentations and discussions will move from theory to practice, and from historical frameworks to contemporary tendencies in printmedia, touching upon a range of themes such as but not limited to: -early 19th-century European painters Caspar David Friedrich, Carl Blechen, John Constable and others -early 19th-century American painters Frederick Edwin Church, Thomas Cole and Albert Bierstadt, as well as others -the landscape's progressive abstraction throughout modern times via the works of Edvard Munch, Paul Klee, Max Ernst, Leon Spilliaert, Georgia O'Keeffe and others -the works of American Abstract Expressionists Barnet Newman, Mark Rothko, Lee Krasner and others -contemporary artists Anselm Kiefer, Gerhard Richter, Chen Qi, Fang Lemin and others