Looking Beyond the Paper

Written by Washington Printmakers Gallery

Looking Beyond the Paper: Barbara Bitondo's Luminous Horizons‍

Printmakers are often asked where a print ends: at the edge of the plate, the boundary of the paper, or the moment of impression. Barbara Bitondo's exhibition Luminous Horizons proposes a different answer. In this ambitious body of work, botanical monoprinting expands beyond the traditional sheet and into the language of textiles, assemblage, and material memory.

Working directly on reclaimed vintage fabrics, Bitondo uses plant forms as points of departure rather than destinations. Printed imagery is layered with paper, thread, handmade pigments, and stitched interventions, creating works that occupy a compelling space between print, textile, and object. The resulting surfaces reveal themselves gradually. Marks emerge and recede. Fragments of botanical forms mingle with evidence of repair, accumulation, and transformation. The print becomes less a fixed image than a record of process and passage.

What may be especially interesting to members of the Washington Printmakers Gallery community is the way Bitondo stretches the possibilities of monoprinting while remaining deeply committed to its essential qualities. Each work preserves the immediacy, unpredictability, and singularity that draw many artists to the medium, even as it moves confidently into larger and more sculptural territory. Works such as Excavation I, Lingering Light, and Moonwater demonstrate how the printed mark can serve as a foundation for broader explorations of memory, atmosphere, and place.

Those familiar with Bitondo's earlier WPG solo exhibition, Engaging the Wild, will recognize a continuing interest in botanical imagery and material experimentation, while noting a significant shift from the intimate scale of paper sculptures and small installations to the immersive presence of these monumental textile-based works.

The exhibition is accompanied by Horizons 2022-2026, a catalogue documenting four years of work through photographs by Pete Duvall. In writing the catalogue's prologue, Where Light Lingers, I found myself returning to the idea that these works are less descriptions of landscape than meditations on what remains after an encounter with it. Light, weather, memory, travel, and time become embedded not only in imagery but also in the materials themselves. Cloth bears histories. Thread traces pathways. Printed impressions function as both image and evidence.

Bitondo has described the work as an exploration of "how light, atmosphere, memory, and place shape our experience of the world." That sensibility is evident throughout the exhibition. These are works that reward slow looking. They invite viewers to move closer, step back, and reconsider relationships between surface and depth, image and object, observation and recollection.

At a moment when contemporary printmaking continues to expand across disciplines, Luminous Horizons offers a thoughtful example of how traditional print processes can evolve without losing their distinctive character. The exhibition reminds us that printmaking remains not merely a set of techniques but a way of thinking: attentive to traces, transformations, and the enduring power of the mark.

-by Rama George

Exhibition Information:

Barbara Bitondo - Luminous Horizons
Whittemore House Museum and Gallery, 1526 New Hampshire Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20036 

Exhibition Dates: September 10-December 8, 2026

Washington Printmakers Gallery
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