A Printer, a Gallery and the New Abstract Expressionism Stamps

Tom Buckham writes in the Buffalo News about a "serendipitous convergence of business and art."

Tom reports, "When Ashton Potter USA Ltd. in Amherst bid last year on a contract to print a series of postage stamps commemorating the art movement known as abstract expressionism, no one there realized that Albright-Knox Art Gallery owned four of the 10 featured paintings."

The printer, Ashton Potter, the world’s largest producer of postage stamps with secure printing plants, and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery are both located in and around Buffalo, New York.

The Albright-Knox works in the commemorative series are Pollock’s iconic “Convergence,” Mark Rothko’s “Orange and Yellow,” Robert Motherwell’s “Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 34” and Arshile Gorky’s “The Liver Is in the Cock’s Comb.”

Yesterday evening the gallery held a special event celebrating stamps and art.

Titled, "The Hobby of Kings: Stamp Collecting and the Albright-Knox," members of the public were given tours of the paintings and invited to create postage stamp scrapbooks. Also on hand was stamp expert Lou Montesano from Lincoln Coin & Stamp Company, Inc. who answered questions about stamps and stamp collecting.

To bring the evening to a close, the gallery showed Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Dekalog (1989), an episode from the acclaimed Decalogue series which featured estranged brothers slowly developing a fanaticism for the stamp collecting of their late father.

To read the article about the printer of the new stamps, click here.

For more on the Albright-Knox Gallery, click here.

Shown above, Barry Switzer, chief executive officer of Ashton Potter USA, displays a press approval sheet for the postage stamp series honoring abstract expressionists.