Contemporary Walker Museum Allen Ruppersberg Special Thermographic Raised Ink Exhibition Poster

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Walker Museum Exclusive poster for the exhibition Allen Ruppersberg: Intellectual Property 1968–2018. Sold Out Museum Exhibition Poster. Due to special … Read more Walker Museum Exclusive poster for the exhibition Allen Ruppersberg: Intellectual Property 1968–2018. Sold Out Museum Exhibition Poster. Due to special printing process, the black areas are in a puffy shiny ink.

Thermographic printing is a fantastic printing technique that is commonly used on greeting cards, wedding invitations, and other printed materials that require embossing with a natural look and feel to them. Some printers use this process to make printed font or image elements 3D-esque, as do many hobbyists who engage in the delights of crafts for their own homemade projects.

Allen Ruppersberg: Intellectual Property 1968–2018 accompanies a major retrospective exhibition on one of conceptual art’s most inventive and acclaimed practitioners. Emerging in late-1960s Los Angeles, Ruppersberg was among that city’s first generation of conceptual artists to espouse a working method that privileges ideas and process over conventional aesthetic objects. Deploying posters, books, postcards and even a café and hotel, his projects have consistently had at their center a focus on the American vernacular—its music, popular imagery and ephemera—mining the nuances of culture through its unsung conventions. From his earliest works, the artist has also welcomed the involvement of the viewer as participant, inviting an immersive experience of his work through language, visual density, accumulated elements and ideas.


The Thermographical Process
The first process of thermography involves the application of a powder commonly known as embossing/ thermographic powder. Made from plastic resins, the powder coats the page and attaches itself to the wet ink (the areas selected for embossing).

The substrate moves from the powder stage on to the vacuum process where the excess powder is removed from the paper, leaving only the inked parts coated and ready for the final stage.

The removal of excess powder is not always done with a vacuum. Instead there are some machines that use a combination of vibrations and a conveyor belt with runners that alter the orientation of the page (from horizontal to vertical) to allow excess powder to deposit into a sump, which is recycled and applied to following application processes in step 1.

Once the powder has been applied and the excess removed, the substrate finally reaches the transforming process where it is passed through a radiant oven, exposed to temperatures between 900 and 1300°C (Wikipedia) for 2 to 3 seconds.

As it passes through the oven, the substrate rises in temperature, causing the powder-coated elements of the page to melt and transform until they look shiny, raised and slightly bubble-like.

Born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1944, Allen Ruppersberg has been the subject of more than 60 solo shows. His only other US retrospective, The Secret of Life and Death, was presented by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in 1985. His work is in the collection of public institutions such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Le Fonds Ronal d’Art, among many others. Ruppersberg lives and works in Los Angeles, Cleveland and New York. See less