Erratic

Gregg Bordowitz , Erratic, 2025
Silkscreen, Somerset 410gsm
45 x 37.50 cm
Edition of 25
Signed and numbered 
Unframed

Standard Price £350* 
Patron’s Price £315** 

* Edition prices will increase as they sell out.
** Patron’s price is available to those who support Camden Art Centre via our Patron and Young Patron scheme. For further information please click here.

This edition has been produced on the occasion of Gregg Bordowitz exhibition There: a Feeling at Camden Art Centre, 2025. 

About the artist
Gregg Bordowitz is a renowned filmmaker, writer, and activist whose work has been exhibited at the Whitney, the New Museum, Artist Space, MoMA (all New York), the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and Tate Modern, among others. A major retrospective of his work, Gregg Bordowitz: I Wanna Be Well, was organised by the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College, in 2018 and subsequently presented at the Art Institute of Chicago and MoMA PS1. In the 1980s, his creative practice was focused on responding to the AIDS crisis. He organised and documented a number of protests against government inaction and advocated for health education and harm reduction as a member of the groundbreaking AIDS activist group ACT UP. He also served as a founding member of the 1980s video/film collectives Testing the Limits and Diva TV. Bordowitz is the author of The AIDS Crisis Is Ridiculous and Other Writings, 1986–2003 (2004), General Idea: Imagevirus (2010), Volition (2010), and Glenn Ligon: Untitled (I Am a Man) (2018).

For Camden, I received the great opportunity to produce an edition of prints working with silk screen printing techniques at K2 Studio in London. Previously, I made monotypes on a printing bed at 10 Grand Press in Brooklyn, N.Y, and selections of my monotypes are included in my exhibition, There: a Feeling. Until now, I never tried silk-screen. It was very exciting. Pressing monotypes on a bed felt like painting, applying thick layers of inks pressed into paper to make one-of-a-kind prints. The silk-screen technique used to make Erratic permitted a crisper line emphasizing the calligraphic aspects of my drawings; as well as the ability to repeat gestures across a numbered edition. The drawings for Erratic were improvised directly onto clear sheets of acetate with various sized Sharpie markers. These layers of drawings were combined to produce three screens, choosing three colors (lilac, pearlescent and black), applied (wiped) onto a grey ground. The line of the drawings barely exceeded the printed boarder of the grey ground. I wanted to play with the edges of the composition questioning where the border of the print ends.

Overall, I am interested in confounding distinctions between drawing and writing. The marks I make in my prints are limited to the four Hebrew letters of the tetragrammaton—the ineffable, unpronounceable four-letter Hebrew word, the name of G-d in Judaism that spells creation into existence daily. Traditionally, the name is never uttered and appears only in written form. In my prints, I concentrate on the letters of the tetragrammaton, writing them over and over, every line drawn from a shape in one of the letters – an action determined by a numerological system – I arrive at a series of gestures that are dense, energetic, unpredictable.

Additionally, I’m inspired by concrete poets Gerhard Rühm, Mary Ellen Solt, and b.p. nicol, as well as a the calligraphic work of Ben Shahn. My prints come out of an abiding interest in contemporary visual poetry and also a centuries-old meditational practice of rearranging alphabet letters in one’s mind.

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