River Landscape #4

Dorothy Dehner

c. 1953 (printed 1993)

Engraving

Nasher Sculpture Center

Printmaking was pivotal to Dehner’s work as a sculptor. In 1952, she was introduced to printmaking at Atelier 17, the innovative workshop founded by Stanley William Hayter. Dehner credited the process of engraving, in which the artist scratches directly into a copper plate with a stylus called a burin, with reawakening her interest in creating sculpture. As with her drawings, the formal language of Dehner’s prints also had an impact on the sculptures she would make—the River Landscapes, for example, are among the first instances of the horizontal format she would explore in the Nasher’s bronze, "Low Landscape No. 3." Dehner worked h