Mirka Lugosi
Born in 1958 in Transylvania.

This artist born a few miles from Count Dracula's castle, a particular place which seems to have inspired her world depicting atypical characters. An underground activist in the 80's, she's experimenting for the first time her touch on lithographic stone for our editions.

After the three women in her series Les éthérées, we wanted to work on a larger scale and move in a new direction by exploring landscape -- something Mïrka Lugosi, esteemed collaborator and draftswoman extraordinaire, often depicts in her drawings but never in her lithographs. Started in December 2019, this phantasmagorical image was completed in January 2021. As Mïrka was building her intricate drawing on stone, we imagined printing it in monochrome graphite black, but changed our minds after the first proofs; the scene seemed to call out for additional gentle layers of color. An almost invisible yellow ochre in the background, evanescent pinks on the flying saucer and vegetation (on each print, a finicky Lugosi also penciled a bit more pink onto the fuselage) and a pale dirty orange, giving the horizon an unearthly glow. Each layer was carefully studied, drawn and redrawn for a great many hours, then tried time and time again until we found just the right balance.
The resulting image, a mid-20th-century UFO landing in a mid-19th-century German Romantic landscape, with its sense of eerie timelessness, has opened up a new frontier. Two more versions have come out since, with a new approach using the same drawing, this time printed in silver ink.