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A Gift for Printmaking

23 October - 09 November 2024

Northern Print were gifted a varied selection of works by a number of notable artists working in the UK between 1970s and 1990s from the estate of Alan Cox.

Alan Cox was sought out by major artists to make prints of their work, but also created art of his own After graduating in 1965, Alan established a lithography workshop, Grafik, in Whitechapel, and then Sky Editions in the pre-gentrified Butler’s Wharf area of Docklands.

In 1979 he moved his workplace to Charlotte Road, Shoreditch, east London, then a rough and rundown neighbourhood, where the only pubs, the Bricklayers and the Barley Mow, closed at weekends. For the next 35 years, often through hardship and struggle, he produced fine prints of the work of many artists, embracing the “social art” of lithography in which, as he said, “you always work together”.

Extract from Alan Cox - Obituary
Emily Pedder, Pub. The Guardian, Tue 13 Jul 2021

Image Library

Alan Cox

Exhibition View

Exhibition View

Exhibition View

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Aside from being a great lithographer, Alan made his own art prints, which were suffused with an energetic sense of colour, surreal humour, and a passion for re-seeing the everyday. He worked with Paula Rego in 1982 on three large lithographs and was one of 10 artists invited to contribute a screenprint to the Royal Academy Schools portfolio Number 1, with the other contributors including Terry Frost, Peter Blake, Bruce McLean, Richard Kirwan and Sandra Blow. He won prizes at the Royal Academy and the Krakow Print Biennale in Poland, and his work is held in the Government Art Collection, the British Council collection, the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro, and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.