Myth and Culture Mingle in Annalise Gratovich’s Complex Prints

Prints of The Healer drying at Flatbed Press (courtesy of Flatbed Press)

Picture a Russian nesting doll, but instead of a palm-sized stackable figure, it’s on paper and large enough to look you in the eye. Now you’re close to grasping the immense scope of Annalise Gratovich’s ongoing print collection, “Carrying Things From Home.”

Presented as part of PrintAustin, a monthlong festival spotlighting Austin’s printmaking scene, Gratovich’s decadelong project is up to seven towering works in what will be an eight-piece series (final print The Fool should be done by the end of the year). Each piece centers a matryoshka-esque doll figure, complete with elemental names like The Mariner, The Hunter, or The Mother. Their black shadowed eyes stare outward. Wrapped in richly decorated robes and surrounded by plants, the rounded figures offer stylized symbols of their trade – an arrow-riddled whale, a curled rabbit, the sheltered face of a child.

The latest exhibition debuts The Healer, a massive being decked in an elaborate smock, crowned with leaves and webs. Mossy greens and browns spotlight sprouting fungi at the doll’s feet. Intricate details – the spiderweb headpiece, the whorls of the smock, overlapping leaf tendrils – invite closer scrutiny. The mind whirls to draw mythic connections in each inked element. The other six prints equally evoke alluring riddles. Why the drooped bird in The Builder? What is held in The Undertaker’s tiny coffin? Are the trees in The Mother there to show personal growth or ancestral roots?

According to Gratovich, “Carrying Things From Home” consciously stems from her own cultural landscape. The dolls and textiles pay homage to her Ukrainian heritage. The flora and desert-tinged color palette nod to her Texas home. One of the oldest prints, The Musician, is directly inspired by her history. Here the doll holds a large accordion, a lit cigarette dangling from its lips. This harks back to Gratovich’s grandfather, a Ukrainian refugee during World War II. He fled the country but took his accordion, which he used to entertain American troops in exchange for cigarettes. The archetype holds the actual tokens seen in the story.

This series is a labor of love, heavy emphasis on the labor. Gratovich uses the chine collé woodcut technique, where a paper design is overlaid on the woodcut to add color and dimension. Selective of her hues, Gratovich hand-dyes the paper. The Healer contained roughly 60 paper elements, carefully and quickly applied with wheat paste before finalizing the print. With work this big – each piece is 71 by 40 inches – it takes a team to complete the process. For this piece, fellow Flatbed Press members Alyssa Ebinger, Emery Spina, and Paige Perusquia helped Gratovich set and handle the art. The chine collé process adds a delicate layering to each piece, slight fuzz and depth. Between that and the sheer size of the prints, witnessing this collection in person is a must.

While the “totemic beings” of the dolls are the exhibit’s focal point, Flatbed also displays a smattering of Gratovich’s letterpress and collage work. There are folkloric botanical prints, smaller-scale works full of sinewy leaves and branching roots, every so often interrupted by ominous skeletal forms.

Her collages, amalgamations of print remnants framed in copper and wood, combine similar floral motifs with hands or faces. Gratovich turned to collage after diagnosis and treatment for an autoimmune disease. “The collage was the work I could take with me when I had to leave home, work in bed, or during my hospitalizations,” says Gratovich of that time. “I lost a lot of physical ability and of course, creativity, in illness. I had done a little collage work previously but that practice really bloomed when I wasn’t able to be in my studio or to develop new print work.” The yearning, grasping motifs in those pieces particularly echo her journey. I especially enjoyed Metamorphosis I and II, where clips of leaves, stars, and falling flower petals circle an animalistic head.

Regardless of the work, whether small woodcuts or her epic figures, Gratovich’s work spins through nature’s cycles, holding the fraught tension between death and growth. Her depictions of health, doubts, fears, and hopes leap off each inked form. Gratovich’s art may be directly sown from her being, but perfectly presents a universal passage through humanity.

“Carrying Things From Home”

Flatbed Press

Open Tuesday-Friday, 10am-5pm; Saturdays, noon-5PM

Closes March 2

Editor’s note: This review originally described the prints as on canvas; they are on paper. It also mistakenly stated it was Gratovich’s great-grandfather who fled Ukraine; it was the artist’s grandfather. The Chronicle regrets the errors.