Studio Prints: An Artists’ Workshop

The Courtauld Gallery, Strand, WC2R 0RN, London

June 6, 2026 – September 13, 2026

This display of prints by artists including Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach and Paula Rego celebrates the little-known story of the lively printmaking workshop established in London in 1968 by Dorothea Wight (1944-2013), who was later joined in 1974 by her future husband Marc Balakjian (1938-2017). Funded by Wight after she left the Slade School of Art, what had started as a small enterprise in a basement in north London soon became a dynamic meeting place for artists, establishing Studio Prints as a legendary London printmaking workshop. Coinciding with a resurgence of interest in printmaking in the 1960s and 1970s, Wight and Balakjian collaborated with artists such as Auerbach, Freud, Leon Kossoff, Rego, and Celia Paul, some of whom became close friends. This display marks the recent acquisition of a group of proof impressions by these celebrated London-based artists, allocated to The Courtauld by HM Government under the Cultural Gifts Scheme.