Home Landscape Design MANIFOLD DESTINY

With new online art gallery Manifold Editions, you wont need a fortune to hang your walls with a few leading YBAs.
You know your way around contemporary art. You can walk into a gallery and talk that art theory discourse with the best of them. You attend auctions and know a good price for a small Peter Doig canoe painting or some of Lisa Milroys shoes. Even so, even for experts like you, the contemporary art world can be an opaque world that seems to poorly serve the individual collector of more modest means.
For those who like looking in the windows of galleries, but rarely cross the threshold, Manifold Editions looks ю be something of a godsend. Launched on 8 November, it is a new contemporary art website selling limited - edition, high - quality signed prints that you can browse at your leisure. It sells prints costing up to ?3,000 and the whole process is transparent, accessible and easy. You can buy what you think will look good on your walls, not what you think will treble in price if the artist gets picked for the next Bicnnalc. This is for people who want to live with contemporary art, not for collectors who want to stick an investment in storage, says James Booth - Clibborn, the driving force behind Manifold Editions. I had a lot of friends who asked me, "Im interested in buying some contemporary art, where can I go?", says Booth - Clibborn, who comes from a family of art printers. So I decided to produce a really easy route for people to get very high - quality artworks by internationally recognised names. The company will both distribute the prints of other suppliers and also commission and print works itself by the best known of the YBAs and a range of international contemporary artists.
Quality is the key here and Booth - Clibborn has the background to provide it. For the last ten years hes been at the art and design publisher Phaidon and before that worked with his brother Charles high - end art publisher The Paragon Press. Ive been involved in the printing process for 20 - odd years, and never tire of pushing the production process ever further, he says. One of the printers of the Manifold works, in addition to The Paragon Press, will be Thumbprint Editions, Peter Kosowiczs art printing house in Camberwell, London. Editions will be limited to around 70 prints of each work, all signed and numbered by the artist. It is also a kind of marketing opportunity for the artists, giving them a broader horizon and getting their work out there more.

MANIFOLD DESTINY


The website, designed by British graphic design behemoth Why Not Associates, currently has 130 works by zi artists available. These include Anish Kapoor, Gavin Turk, Sam Taylor - Wood, as well as the aforementioned Doig and Milroy. A new scries of spot woodcuts by Damicn Hirst will be on sale from mid - November.
So potential buyers can get up close to the prints, Booth - Clibborn is planning to open a pop - up store in London next spring. Manifold Editions was also a presence at the London Affordable Art Fair - and will be at the fairs next edition too, marking the first time in a very long while that some of these international big hitters have had the word affordable anywhere near their names.


ARTISTS IMPRESSIONS


Harry Handelsman, the art collector, property developer and man behind the Manhattan Loft Corporation, is also moving into the business of limited - edition art prints. He has gone into partnership with Thang Vo - Ta. who helped compile the art collection for the Handelsman - refurbished St Pancras Renaissance Hotel in London. Their new company, St Pancras Editions, will sell prints of well - known contemporary masters as well as emerging artists. The first one on offer is a silkscreen print of the pop art Jean Harlow painted by Gerald Laing in 1964. The original work currently hangs in the Chambers Club at the St Pancras Renaissance. The limited run of 200 prints are titled, signed, dated and numbered by Laing and have been silkscreen - printed by Artizan Editions in Hove.
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