Featuring the Katrine Harries Print Cabinet

The Katrine Harries Print Cabinet (KHPC) is a unit within the CCA and holds the Katrine Harries Print Collection of the University of Cape Town. Named in honour of the artist who established the teaching of printmaking at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, the KHPC has been instrumental in promoting printmaking as well as conserving, researching, and exhibiting prints from the collection through various publications and projects over the past decades. These include Mordant Methods (Pippa Skotnes and Jo Ractliffe, 1988), What’s bred in stone (Stephen Inggs, 1998), On the Surface (Fritha Langerman, Pippa Skotnes and Roderick Sauls, 1996) and Homage Portfolio of Prints (Stephen Inggs and Pippa Skotnes, 2009).

The Print Cabinet is curated by Fritha Langerman with Emeritus Professors Pippa Skotnes and Stephen Inggs. The collection and database is currently being convened and updated by Oliver Hambsch, Cape Town based printmaker who recently completed his MFA and presented at the Impact 12 conference in Bristol in September. In the upcoming months we will be sharing prints from the collection by local and international artists; celebrating both new and traditional print disciplines in fine art. 

We open this feature with three prints from Katrine Harries, seen above, which she made whilst teaching at Michaelis. The right-hand print – a stone lithograph of a young woman – is taken from the Twenty Prints portfolio, a portfolio of prints produced by twenty South African artists at the Michaelis School of Fine Art between 1951 and 1953.