Fred Genis made only one lithograph of his own. In a career spanning five decades and three continents — printing for over eighty artists across some of the most celebrated workshops in the world — he kept his own creative impulse almost entirely to himself, giving everything to the work of others.
The print has no title. It bears no signature. Fred never spoke of it, never showed it, never claimed it. It was discovered quietly during the archiving of his collection — when his daughter Lois came across it one day while archiving prints back in 2009, Fred asked do you like this print, she said yes but he said nothing more.
It was Hendrik Kolenberg — Senior Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Art Gallery of New South Wales for twenty-five years, and one of Fred’s closest friends — who eventually let it be known that Fred had confessed to him the secret: that he was the artist behind the print.
The work itself is a large grid of small individual cells — hundreds of them — each containing a different abstract mark, biomorphic form, or gestural symbol. They read like a private alphabet, a visual diary accumulated in secret — each tiny cell its own complete world. Some suggest figures, some natural forms, some are pure invention. Together they feel simultaneously systematic and spontaneous, orderly on the surface and endlessly varied within. It is the work of a man who had spent fifty years watching how marks behave on stone, finally allowing himself to play entirely for himself.
For a man who understood better than almost anyone alive what it meant to commit a mark to stone, the fact that he made just one print, told no one, and never signed it says everything about his character. The work existed for its own sake, not for recognition.
It is, in its quiet way, the most important print in the entire collection.
