Michael Sandle

Born in 1936 and brought up in the west of England and then the Isle of Man. After National Service, he studied part-time at various art schools before entering the printmaking school at the Slade full-time from 1956 to 1959. Here he was taught etching by Anthony Gross and lithography by Lynton Lamb and Ceri Richards. The catalogue of his first one-man exhibition at the Drian Galleries in Porchester Place, London, in 1963 recorded: 'Whilst at the Slade School of Art he developed a serious interest in printmaking, and after a short stay in Italy went to Paris in order to further his knowledge of printing techniques.

In January 1960 he became employed as a lithographer at the Atelier Patris, a professional studio which specialised in collaborating with artists to produce editions of fine art lithographs [and where Stanley Jones had previously trained]. During his stay there he printed editions and assisted at the production of artists' proofs for Soulages, Sugai among others.' He returned in 1961 to various teaching jobs in England.

Sandle began to introduce sculptural elements into reliefs at the beginning of the 1960s; his first fully three-dimensional work followed in 1966, since when he has worked almost entirely in sculpture and drawing. He left Britain in 1970, teaching first in Canada from 1970 to I973 and since then in Germany, at Pforzheim and Karlsruhe, where he is Professor at the Akademie der Bildenden Kunste.

Since he turned to sculpture, Sandle has made few prints. But between 1956 and the early 1960s he produced a considerable body of work in etching and lithography. Little of this was ever exhibited in Britain, apart from two etchings shown at the Graven Image exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1959, and the (unlisted) items in the 1963 Drian Gallery exhibition. Some prints were also shown in exhibitions abroad (listed on page 84 of the 1988 catalogue).

In 1988 the British Museum acquired directly from the artist a group of twenty of his early prints, mostly lithographs, which show a remarkable experimental inventiveness in both technique and imagery

Bibliography

Michael Sandle, Sculpture and Drawings1957-88 was published as the catalogue of a large retrospective held at the Whitechapel Art Gallery and the Stuttgart Kunstverein in 1988-9. It includes an essay by Marco Livingstone; on page 86 are two photographs of Sandle inking a stone and printing a lithograph at the Slade School in 1957. Other catalogues of recent exhibitions of Sandle's work have nothing to say about the prints that he made in his early years.

Excerpt from Avant-Garde British Printmaking, 1914-1960, no publisher's info available acquired as photocopy with purchase of pieces.

Another resource: Michael Sandle, Memorials for the Twentieth Century, Norbert Lynton, Colin Amery, Prepared by Tate Gallery Liverpool, Edited by Fiona Bradley, Designed by John Rooney, Manchester, Printed by Printfine Ltd. Liverpool, ISBN 1-85437-166-5