Annalise Gratovich - “The Fool”
Flatbed is excited to announce the publication of The Fool, the final work in Annalise Gratovich’s Villager Series, a cycle of eight chine collé woodcuts created and published with Flatbed Press over the past twelve years. Standing at an impressive 71 x 40 inches, The Fool brings the series to a powerful conclusion.
Across the Villager Series, Gratovich examines displacement, cultural and self-identity, intention, accountability, burden, and regret. Each figure—The Mariner, The Hunter, The Builder, The Undertaker, The Musician, The Mother, The Healer, and now The Fool—is conceived as a totemic being, a symbolic guardian with a distinct role. Their forms reference matryoshka figures, while their detailed surfaces draw from Ukrainian embroidery traditions, translated into patterns, motifs, and stitched silhouettes. These echoes of folk and textile arts from the artist’s Ukrainian and Texan heritage conjure nostalgia, memory, and the ache of distant or irretrievable places.
In The Fool, Gratovich opens a final, dreamlike chapter: the figure holds a field of stars within their body, as if carrying an inner cosmos touched by both wonder and vulnerability. Surrounding patterns—floral, animal, celestial—unfold like a visual map of intuition, risk, and the unknown. Here, the Fool becomes not an object of naiveté but a guide into possibility, reminding us that beginnings and endings share the same threshold.
Annalise Gratovich was named the City of Austin’s Creative Ambassador of Visual Arts in 2019 and exhibits widely across the United States and internationally, with recent exhibitions in Buggenhagen, Germany; New York, NY; Dawson City, Yukon; San Antonio, Texas; and Austin, Texas.
Contact Flatbed Center for Contemporary Printmaking to purchase or for more information.
