LONDON.- The Royal Academy of Arts presents an exhibition of prints by Royal Academician Peter Freeth. The exhibition, in the Tennant Room, explores the themes to which Freeth has returned throughout his career as well as the unique process behind his prints.

Freeth’s printmaking took an unexpected turn thanks to the arrival of a postcard some 35 years ago from his uncle Andrew Freeth (himself a printmaker and Royal Academician), outlining a strange and untried new way of creating etchings. The technique described in the postcard has become the basis of his subsequent printmaking. Freeth himself says: ‘This show is the brief history of a personal obsession from my first experiments to the most recent, and I hope, reveals the special characteristics of a most unconventional way of making prints – a rich vein I am still mining’.

This obsession is the ‘affair with resin’ of the show’s title, but technique is in fact only one of the artist’s concerns. Freeth has chosen for the exhibition many of the subjects that have captured his imagination which he has revisited time and again in his work. In his own words, these include: ‘the city and its people, the richness of the natural world, the resonance of words, Italy, images of past masters, the drama of light and shade’.

Peter Freeth studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, from 1956 to 1960. In 1960 he won the Prix de Rome in Engraving, taking him to Rome where he lived for three years, travelling extensively throughout Italy. He has been a tutor in etching at the Royal Academy Schools since 1966. Freeth has exhibited widely in the UK and world-wide. His work is held in public collections including the Arts Council, the British Museum, the Government Art Collection and the Victoria and Albert Museum, as well as in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. He was elected a Member of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers and Royal Academician in 1991 (ARA 1990). Peter Freeth lives and works in London and Italy.