About - Rick Amor

This online catalogue of Rick Amor’s prints is a work in progress.

Its first phase represents the first of three parts of the complete catalogue of Amor’s prints, and focuses on what, both for the artist and for the compiler of the catalogue, are the most complex of prints – the intaglios, which include the various kinds of etchings, as well as drypoints and mezzotints. This complexity stems, in part, from the etching process itself, and also from the way in which Amor uses it.

The plate used in the making of an intaglio print (the plate is almost always copper in Amor’s case) allows for many changes to be made – whether additions, corrections or deletions. The printing effects can also be changed radically from one impression to the next, depending on how the plate is inked and wiped. Amor exploits the possibilities to the full.

Occasionally, an etching will quickly assume its final form, but more often than not the image is built step by step, state after state, with Amor taking many proofs along the way. He works tonally and often experiments with plate tone, allowing ink to remain on the surface of the plate, and producing dramatically different images of a single state.

Amor keeps close track of his work and often returns to a print some time after he has first worked on it. Plates that have been editioned are sometimes reworked several years later, and perhaps re-editioned, with titles being changed along the way – all this with the artist using the one matrix.

This catalogue, which encompasses 177 works and documents over 900 states, aims to organize Amor’s prints and their many processes in a way that is clear, and to present the information digitally in a way that is readily accessible.

For an account of how the catalogue is structured, and for a guide to the individual fields within the catalogue and its database, see Guide to Entries.

Rick Amor: An Online Catalogue Raisonné of the Prints is a work of independent scholarship, supported by Black Moon Pty Ltd, and by Niagara Galleries, Melbourne.

Citing the catalogue: Irena Zdanowicz, Rick Amor: An Online Catalogue Raisonné of the Prints, Melbourne, 2017, online at http://catalogue.rickamor.com.au.