From ROSA #7: Jessica Wood meets Gyr King, prince of prints.
Founded in 1982 by three brothers in a basement flat in Brighton, King & McGaw started out by producing prints on a second-hand screen press. Today, they occupy 30,000 sq foot of state-of-the-art workshops in Newhaven and supply the country’s leading museums and organisations with everything print. And this year, the company are the headline sponsors for the Turner Prize at Towner Eastbourne. I interview CEO Gyr King to find out more about their extraordinary success and to ask for advice on art collecting.
Which famous artists have you worked with?
One of the great privileges of being involved with museums and artists is the personal interaction with artists, understanding a little better how they think and work and seeing them in their working environment. My relationship with Howard Hodgkin moved from just professional (working on print and frame matters) to a friendship that lasted until his death. We regularly had breakfasts together, and visiting him at his house in France and his winter retreat in India were life changing. Artists tend to be great communicators so meeting and working with Terry Frost, Patrick Caulfield, Bridget Riley, Peter Doig, Julian Opie, Anthony Gormley, Tom Hammick, Marc Quinn and many others gives an insight beyond their work. Recently Johnny Depp has made a number of trips to our workshops and I have visited his houses in LA and France. Perhaps my most memorable studio visit was made well before we started the business when as a student and with the bravado of youth I knocked on Picasso’s door in France and we discussed pottery!
Why should we have an art collection at all and how can King & McGaw help us start one?
This is a very personal journey and has little to do with how much you have to spend. Pictures and artifacts can be found and purchased in many places and should be an emotional rather than a financial transaction. I still have art works that I bought as a student, and they have followed me through my life, appearing in different rooms and houses that I’ve lived in. The other great thing about collecting art is that it can also change as you do, you can sell and buy as your taste and needs change. If you do buy well, there is the added advantage that you might make a profit, but I would never advise that as the main motivation.
Why did you choose to sponsor the Turner Prize in Eastbourne?
The Turner Prize is organised by Tate and every other year it is held in a regional museum or gallery. Following the great success of becoming a ‘Museum of the Year’ during Covid, Towner was awarded this prestigious opportunity. As a trustee, and with Towner being only a few miles along the coast from our base in Newhaven, it seemed an obvious thing for us to do. We support many artists through the royalties we pay, and sponsorships that help our local community and various charities that are linked to the arts. The Turner Prize is a controversial event, deliberately aimed at pushing boundaries and causing the press, the public and the establishment to reassess what they think art is and should be. What might seem extreme today can quickly become mainstream art tomorrow. It is the business of art to test, question and challenge and the Turner Prize quite often delivers on this. A little like the Booker Prize for literature, an artist winning the Turner will gain an audience and reputation that can really accelerate their practice.
I often get confused with the different types of prints. Please tell us how it all works.
This is often a difficult area for people to understand and it can be confusing. Much simply revolves around the methods used for the reproduction of a work of art onto a substrate. Printing techniques are constantly being invented and refined so this can add to the confusion. A simple guide is that ‘open edition’ prints – straightforward reproductions of an original artwork, that are not numbered or signed and are sold at a relatively affordable price – were in the past printed by the commercial print method of ‘off-set lithography’. This method is also used to print most commercial, books, magazines, packaging etc. In the last 15 years digital printing (specifically inkjet or dry powder laser technology) might also be used. Limited editions – prints that are numbered and signed by the artist – were traditionally printed using print methods that are more suited to high quality, low quantity reproduction. Often artists would be very involved in the operation, even drawing onto stone or copper plates as in etching or stone lithography. Silkscreen, woodcut, linocut, sugar lift, etc. are all alternative print methods that for many years have been the mainstay of limited-edition printing. Today inkjet has also become a common and accepted limited-edition print method, having the advantage of being much cheaper with the ability to print one copy at a time. Digital printing has many names, but giclée, archive print, digital print and others, all are essentially inkjet. Limited editions can come in many edition sizes from a single print to many hundreds. As a rule of thumb, edition sizes under 50 would always be my preference, although up to 250 can be acceptable. Many hundreds might strain credibility.
I see you support Sussex artists. What is special about them, and whose work should we buy?
Sussex has a very strong artistic heritage. Obviously all the Bloomsbury artists, Roland Penrose and Lee Miller, Aubrey Beardsley, Eric Ravilious spring to mind but there are so many exciting Sussex artists past and present that are or have produced very important bodies of work. Wilfred Avery was an important 20th-century artist who lived the last part of his life in Sussex, he is certainly worth exploring. Tom Hammick is a Sussex artist who is producing wonderful oils and woodcut prints.