above: “Sparklers”, 2025. Photogravure, edition of 20.
M anneken Press is pleased to announce the release of Peter and Friends and Sparklers, a pair of photogravure prints by acclaimed New York artist Claire Seidl. These monochromatic works are striking examples of the artist’s painterly approach to photography.
An abstract painter who took up photography mid-career, Seidl allows her painter’s eye to guide her photographic compositions. Elements intrinsic to painting—gestural line, layered space, and ambiguous form—are all present. While her images can be read as abstractions, they remain deeply rooted in the real world, filled with the specifics of place, people, and natural phenomena in all their fleeting, ephemeral qualities.
Like much of Seidl’s photographic work, these photogravures suggest a subtle human presence. Figures appear and dissolve within the frame: in her long, nocturnal exposures, moving bodies become ghostlike, while the static world seems momentarily fixed in time. Seidl approached Manneken Press with the desire to translate her images through photogravure —a hybrid process of intaglio printmaking and photography developed during the infancy of the photographic medium. Valued for its ability to produce velvety continuous tones, photogravure was favored by the Photo-Secessionists and Pictorialists of the late19th and early 20th centuries. Seidl, too, sought this richness of tone and texture for her work.
Peter and Friends (2025) and Sparklers (2025) were each hand-printed from etched copper plates in warm and cool black inks, respectively, on Fabriano Rosaspina paper.
• “Peter and Friends”: image size 12 × 11.5 inches; sheet size 16.75 × 16 inches.
• “Sparklers”: image size 14.75 × 15 inches; sheet size 20.5 × 20 inches.
Contact Manneken Press for current pricing/availability or additional information.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Claire Seidl has been an abstract painter for forty years and a photographer for twenty. A native of Connecticut, she moved to New York City after earning her BFA from Syracuse University, later receiving her MFA in Painting from Hunter College, City University of New York. She also studied photography at the International Center for Photography. Seidl has taught at Hunter College and Hofstra University, and maintains studios in New York City and Rangeley, Maine. Seidl’s work has been featured in more than forty solo exhibitions and over one hundred group shows at venues including the Aldrich Museum, Noyes Museum, McNay Art Museum, South Bend Museum of Art, The Baker Museum, Ewing Gallery at the University of Tennessee, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Russian Museum of Photography, Portland Museum of Art, Ogunquit Museum of American Art, Zillman Art Museum at the University of Maine, and the Center for Maine Contemporary Art. She is a member of American Abstract Artists.
above: Claire Seidl signs her editions at the 2025 IFPDA Print Fair, New York
