Pressing the Boundaries of Printmaking: Five Decades of Mixografia

August 17, 2026 – January 7, 2027Palm Desert, California

Ed Ruscha, "Dog" (1994)

Based in Downtown Los Angeles, Mixografia occupies a singular place in the history of contemporary printmaking. Luis and Lea Remba founded the studio in Mexico City as a gathering space for artists, built on serious experimentation rather than production for its own sake.

In 1973, Rufino Tamayo came to the workshop wanting his prints to carry the texture and physical weight of his paintings. Luis responded by inventing a new process, one capable of registering topography and relief alongside form and color. No commercial paper could withstand the demands of it, so the Rembas' son, Shaye, designed and built custom papermaking machinery to meet the challenge. The studio took its name from the medium it had created: Mixografia.

After a celebrated 1984 exhibition at UCLA's Wright Art Gallery, the Rembas opened a second studio in Los Angeles. Shaye Remba still directs it today, continuing a practice built on three generations of technical mastery and artistic partnership.

The process begins with an artist's original model: a maquette, a drawing, an object, a mark. From it, a three-dimensional plate is cast. Handmade cotton paper is pressed into the inked surface under significant pressure, absorbing pigment while conforming to every contour and indentation the plate carries. The result is a print with body, an object that does not reproduce an image so much as receive one. Paper becomes witness. Relief becomes language. Mixografia's master printers work not as technicians but as true partners, translating an artist's vision into something tactile and dimensional.

Five decades of Mixografia's history reads less like the story of one workshop than a map of contemporary art itself. Pressing the Boundaries of Printmaking brings together artists who share almost nothing except this: each arrived in Downtown Los Angeles with a vision the printed page could not yet hold, and left with something new.

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Works by Helen Frankenthaler and Louise Bourgeois on view in "Pressing the Boundaries of Printmaking: Five Decades of Mixografia".

John Baldessari, a founding figure of West Coast Conceptualism, used the studio's dimensional capacity to give his flattened, faceless figures real physical presence. Louise Bourgeois, working in a register of memory and the body, found in Mixografia a way to carry the coiled, handmade intimacy of thread and wire into paper and ink. Ed Ruscha, chronicler of American vernacular, pressed weathered signage and windblown grass into surfaces that read as much as they are seen. Helen Frankenthaler used the process to hold the same fields of color and gesture that defined her canvases.

Works by Jacob Hashimoto, Manolo Valdes, and John Baldessari on view in "Pressing the Boundaries of Printmaking: Five Decades of Mixografia".

Manolo Valdes, Dario Escobar, and Jacob Hashimoto extend that range further, bringing Spanish figuration, object-based Latin American practice, and a distinctly contemporary approach built from paper, string, and archival print. Conceptualism, feminist sculpture, Pop, Abstract Expressionism, and the generations that followed: what unites this exhibition is not a movement, but a workshop's insistence that no vision is too demanding for paper to hold.