TORBEN BO HALBIRK'S STUDIO

Originally conceived several years ago. TORBEN BO HALBIRK's studio, located at 80 rue du Chemin Vert, in the 11th "arrondissement" of Paris, finally opened in November 1992.
It had been meant to be a working-place as well as a meeting-place for the Danish artists willing to get closer contacts with Europe. Such a workshop was therefore to be heavily equipped, with tools that could be very expensive, but necessary to enable engravers to use means of expression formerly inaccessible to them.
From a place for Danish artists, TORBEN BO HALBIRK's studio has more generally become a place where artists of every origin can work, or meet and experiment. By and large, fruitful contacts have been established with Danish, German, Spanish, Italian or Swiss studios, and these exchanges should increase in the future. in the very friendly atmosphere which has been the hallmark of the enterprise ever since its beginnings.

In such a context, managing the studio is a difficult task: those in charge must contribute to the establishment of artists in a new environment, and help them adapt the studio facilities to their requirements. They also have to complete the exisiting documentation on engraving and engravers and service and develop the workshop. The very purpose is indeed to get every artist to use all the techniques be may see fit, and to do so with the entire liberty and in the outstanding formats permitted by the two 1x2 m-presses and the typographic press, to mention those only.
Last but not least, it is essential that they be able to coordinate the amount of collective work achieved in the workshop and to keep the standards of coherence and quality at the highest level.

TORBEN BO HALBIRK's studio aims at publishing a collector's box of etchings per year, comprising twelve prints by twelve - or only one - engraver, along with audio-cassettes and/or texts and at organizing personal or collective exhibitions centred on the artists in camera. In such an atmosphere of real comeradeship, six of these exhibitions could take place in the course of a year.