In Mr Kitching’s footsteps

Alan Kitching: London’s Building Blocks runs at the GRAGRA gallery in Madrid until 30 June 2025. This exhibition features the work of three young letterpress designer-artists – Theo Hersey, Michelle Dwyer and Christian Granados – alongside that of their mentor and friend Alan Kitching (see ‘Mr Kitching in Italy’ in Pulp 6. Curated by journalist Andrés Oliva, the show kicked off in late March with a busy private view and a workshop – in which eight participants produced a limited-edition publication.

GRAGRA aka Gráficas Granados, is a printing workshop and multipurpose cultural space founded in 2023 by Granados, a designer who worked closely with Kitching and Kelvyn Smith when he studied and worked in London. He is also an associate lecturer and book arts technician at the Istituto Europeo di Design (IED). Hersey is the owner and director of The Typography Workshop in South London, a cornucopia of valuable wood and metal types that he took over from Kitching in 2023. Dwyer, a New Yorker who has lived and worked in London for thirteen years, runs her own studio Nice & Graphic (see ‘Merry and type’ on Pulp Digital) in Peckham, southeast London, and is currently Kitching’s assistant.

Alan Kitching’s virtuosic letterpress work needs little introduction to Pulp readers (see also ‘On message’ in Pulp 19). The ‘Building Blocks’ exhibition includes some of his typographic maps, a poster for Shakespeare’s Hamlet and his early Broadside panels.

Dwyer’s The British Tongue is a hand-printed letterpress series exploring the English language, with quirky phrases such as ‘Well chuffed’ and ‘faffing about’. These twenty posters, each printed on a Vandercook SP15 press use Fedrigoni Arena Rough 200gsm paper.