Erik Desmazières - prints and biography
Master of Fantastical Etchings and Imaginary Architecture
By: Erik Desmazières
Medium: Etching, aquatint & roulette
Year: 2013
ImageSize: 24 X 9 inches
Edition Size: 60
Salle Labrouste, côté nord, fragment portrays a dramatic vertical section of the historic Salle Labrouste reading room at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, designed by architect Henri Labrouste. Soaring iron arches, vaulted glass ceilings, and the quiet activity of readers below are rendered with extraordinary precision and atmospheric depth.
Desmazières is internationally recognized for his architectural prints and his celebrated depictions of libraries, where meticulous draftsmanship transforms real spaces into poetic meditations on knowledge, memory, and imagination. Signed, titled, dated, and numbered in pencil.
By: Erik Desmazières
Medium: Etching, aquatint & roulette
Year: 2011
Edition: Signed, numbered from edition of 150
ImageSize: 9.13 x 10 inches
Érik Desmazières’ La Lune en ses Quartiers exemplifies his ability to blend scientific precision with poetic imagination. It depicts characters studying a globe of the moon and reading books in an fantastical imaginary library and observatory. This print distills the artist’s fascination with the passage of time, the architecture of knowledge, and the enduring mystery of the cosmos.
By: Erik Desmazières
Medium: Etching, aquatint & roulette
Year: 2000
Edition: Signed, titled, dated and numbered from the ed/90.
ImageSize: 7.7 x 13.7 inches
In Sous le signe de la Balance (La Librairie Paul Jammes), Erik Desmazières captures the scholarly calm of a Parisian bookshop interior. An antique balance scale rests among stacks of leather-bound volumes, evoking a quiet meditation on knowledge, measure, and the passage of time. Executed with Desmazières’s trademark precision in etching and aquatint, the print combines architectural clarity with a subtle atmosphere of introspection and reverence for the written word.
By: Erik Desmazières
Medium: Etching, aquatint & roulette
Year: 1991
ImageSize: 24.63 X 39.63 inches
Edition Size: 90
Intérieur à Pressy reveals Erik Desmazières’ masterful command of space, light, and architectural nuance. While the artist is celebrated for his grand imaginary cities and labyrinthine libraries, this interior scene shows his equal talent for quiet, lived-in environments. Subtle shifts in perspective and the meticulous rendering of objects draw the viewer through the room, inviting extended contemplation. The print balances intimacy and complexity, offering a meditation on memory, stillness, and the poetry of interior spaces.
By: Erik Desmazières
Medium: Etching, aquatint
Year: 1999
ImageSize: 6.89 x 18.5
Ville Imaginaire II exemplifies Erik Desmazières’ fascination with imagined architecture—labyrinthine streets, impossible perspectives, and structures that feel both ancient and futuristic. In this elongated panoramic format, the city unfurls like a dreamscape, rendered with his signature precision and atmospheric depth. The print invites the viewer to wander through an invented world where order and mystery coexist in perfect balance.
By: Erik Desmazières
Medium: Etching, aquatint & roulette on chine appliqué
Year: 2011
Edition: From Suite Musaeum Clausum by Sir Thomas Brown (also available on request)
Signed, titled, dated and numbered from edition of 40 printed on chine appliqué
ImageSize: 11.5 x 7.36 inches
In The Skull of Sir Thomas Browne, Erik Desmazières pays homage to the 17th-century physician, author, and antiquarian through a meticulously rendered memento mori. The composition presents two views of Browne’s skull resting atop stacked books, uniting anatomical study with literary history. Desmazières’ exceptionally fine etched textures and subtle aquatint modeling give the skull a sculptural presence, while the chine appliqué surface enhances the print’s tonal depth. The result is a contemplative image that echoes Browne’s fascination with mortality, curiosity, and the material remnants of intellectual life.
By: Erik Desmazières
Medium: Etching, aquatint
Year: 2020
ImageSize: 9.33 x 24.4
In L’Atelier Georges Leblanc, Erik Desmazières transforms an old printmaker’s workshop into a world of intricate machinery, quiet order, and layered history. Massive gears and wheels dominate the foreground, their textures rendered with extraordinary precision, while the light-filled studio beyond reveals tools, fabrics, and remnants of artistic labor. The composition balances industrial structure with atmospheric stillness, celebrating the craft traditions and tactile beauty of the printmaking studio.
By: Erik Desmazières
Medium: Etching, aquatint & roulette
Year: 2021
ImageSize: 9.76 X 23.5 inches
Edition Size: 30
Based on an earlier drawing of Tazé’s first atelier, the depiction achieves an admirable blending of realistic detail with abstracted geometry, the latter emphasized by divisions in shading. It’s worth noting that the formal austerity of this work is achieved purely through etching and roulette, absent the tonal subtleties afforded by his customary use of aquatint.
By: Erik Desmazières
Medium: Etching, aquatint & roulette
Year: 2010
Edition: Signed, numbered from edition of 60
ImageSize: 12.8 x 9.4 inches
In Caprice Vénitien, Erik Desmazières constructs a richly layered visual puzzle, inviting the viewer into a miniature cabinet of curiosities. A meticulously rendered bookshelf frames an inserted image of Venetian figures beside a boat, a scene that feels simultaneously theatrical and dreamlike. Suspended before the books, a faceted geometric solid adds a note of scholarly whimsy, echoing Renaissance studies in proportion and illusion. Desmazières’ signature blend of architectural precision, historical reference, and quiet surrealism turns this intimate print into a meditation on the act of collecting—objects, images, and ideas. The result is a refined caprice that bridges the imaginative and the archival.
By: Erik Desmazières
Medium: Etching, aquatint & roulette
Year: 2005
Edition: Signed, titled, dated and numbered from the ed/60.
ImageSize: 12.75 x 9.25 inches
In Square d’Orléans, Paris, Erik Desmazières transforms a quiet architectural courtyard into a scene of layered depth and shifting perception. Dense foliage occupies the foreground, its dark, sculptural leaves partially veiling the elegant 19th-century façade behind it. The result is a subtle interplay between concealment and revelation, as the viewer peers through the organic screen toward the archway and windows beyond. With his characteristic precision in line, texture, and spatial ambiguity, Desmazières creates a composition that feels at once observational and atmospheric—a portrait of a place filtered through the rhythms of shadow, structure, and nature.
By: Erik Desmazières
Medium: Etching, aquatint & roulette & drypoint
Year: 2019
ImageSize: 23.8 × 31.5 in
Edition: 60
In Atelier, villa du Lavoir, Erik Desmazières renders a masterfully detailed portrait of the printmaker’s workshop—an environment dense with tools, presses, papers, pigments, and accumulated history. The composition stretches across a broad, luminous space, inviting the viewer to wander through shelves of inks, stacks of plates, and the monumental gears of the press itself. Desmazières balances technical rigor with atmospheric quiet: every object is crisply articulated, yet the room feels softened by time and steady work. It is both a documentary study and a poetic homage to the craft of printmaking, capturing the soul of the atelier with extraordinary depth and clarity.
By: Erik Desmazières
Medium: Etching, aquatint & roulette
Year: 2006
ImageSize: 17.5 x 34.25 inches
In René Tazé Atelier VII, Erik Desmazières renders the legendary Parisian printmaking studio with remarkable precision and atmospheric depth. Massive gears, presses, drawers, and worktables converge in a dense yet orderly arrangement, revealing the mechanical heart of the atelier. Light drifts across tools and architectural columns, guiding the eye through overlapping spaces and meticulous textures. Both documentary and imaginative, the composition captures the quiet grandeur of a workshop central to contemporary intaglio practice.
By: Erik Desmazières
Medium: Etching, aquatint & roulette
Year: 2009
Edition: Signed, numbered from ed/75 that accompanied catalogue for the Telfair Museum exhibition.
ImageSize: 8.2 x 6.5 inches
In Entrance Hall with Globe (without margins), Erik Desmazières revisits his majestic architectural interior dominated by a vast suspended globe. This edition—created for the Telfair Museum exhibition—emphasizes the artist’s extraordinary command of line, perspective, and atmospheric detail. The composition draws the viewer down the gallery’s central axis, where two figures contemplate the globe’s imposing presence amid meticulously rendered classical architecture.
By: Erik Desmazières
Medium: Etching, aquatint & roulette
Year: 1997
Edition: 250
ImageSize: 8.25 x 3.97 inches
Framed Size: 13 x 9 inches
Erik Desmazières’ New Year’s Card – 1997 presents a fantastical horned figure standing in a shallow architectural niche, its ornate armor and organic textures rendered with remarkable delicacy. Snow-like flecks drift across the scene, heightening the wintry, otherworldly atmosphere. The central plaque bearing “1997” anchors the composition, echoing the tradition of Desmazières’ annual New Year etchings—small in format yet rich in imagination and craftsmanship.
By: Erik Desmazières
Medium: Etching, aquatint & roulette
Year: 2009
Edition: Signed, numbered from edition with full margins
ImageSize: 9.75 x 7.75 inches
Erik Desmazières’s Entrance Hall with Globe presents a surreal vision of an ornate gallery dominated by a monumental suspended globe. Rendered with exquisite precision, the scene blends architectural grandeur with a sense of quiet mystery as two figures regard the floating sphere. Desmazières’s meticulous etching technique heightens the contrast between the globe’s intricate surface and the hall’s classical symmetry, creating an atmosphere that invites contemplation of exploration, knowledge, and the passage of time.
Erik Desmazières
Biography
Erik Desmazières is one of the foremost contemporary printmakers, known for meticulously detailed etchings of imaginary architecture, labyrinthine libraries, workshops, cities, and still lifes. His work has been featured in more than twenty museum retrospectives across Europe, Canada, and the United States. In 2009, he was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts de l’Institut de France.
Born in Rabat, Morocco, in 1948, Desmazières moved to France at a young age and made Paris his home. After studying at the Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris, he pursued printmaking at the Cours du Soir de la Ville de Paris. He later became president of La Société des Peintres-Graveurs Français.
Associated with the tradition of Art Fantastique, Desmazières combines Renaissance precision with surreal invention. His artist’s books, portfolios, and individual prints are held in major collections worldwide, including the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
More info and pictures on le Magasin central des imprimés
More info and pictures on The Library of Babel
Related artists working with narrative and symbolic imagery:
Gérard Trignac
François Houtin
Peter Milton
Miguel Condé
Oldrich Kulhanek
By: Erik Desmazières
Medium: Etching, aquatint & roulette
Year: 2013
ImageSize: 24.6 x 12.95 inches
In Le Magasin central des imprimés (Plate No. 3), Erik Desmazières transforms the interior of the Bibliothèque nationale de France’s print storage into an intricate architectural labyrinth. A steep metal stairway cuts sharply through stacked shelving, pipes, and gridded floors, amplifying the sense of vertical ascent and descent. Every surface—steel, tile, shadow, and structure—is rendered with his characteristic exactitude, turning this utilitarian space into a dramatic study of rhythm, geometry, and perspective.
By: Erik Desmazières
Medium: Etching, aquatint & roulette
Year: 2013
ImageSize: 24.6 x 12.95 inches
In Le Magasin central des imprimés (Plate No. 5), Erik Desmazières explores the towering verticality of the Bibliothèque nationale de France’s historic print repositories. A narrow elevated passage leads the viewer past networks of pipes, railings, and gridded floors toward soaring arched windows that reveal dense tiers of books below. Desmazières’ precise linework and tonal control give the space an almost cathedral-like gravity, transforming this utilitarian archive into a monumental architectural vision.
By: Erik Desmazières
Medium: Etching, aquatint & roulette
Year: 2013
ImageSize: 24.6 x 12.95 inches
Highly detailed etching by Erik Desmazières depicting an industrial multi-level book storage interior with metal staircases, railings, and long rows of shelves receding into deep perspective.
Catalogs
By: Erik Desmazières
Format: 9 1/4 x 10 1/8 in. (23.7 x 25.5 cm).
Notes: 60 pages, with 72 b/w illustrations.
Preface by Robert Flynn Johnson, Curator, Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, San Francisco
By: Erik Desmazières
Format: 9 1/4 x 10 1/8 in. (23.7 x 25.5 cm).
Notes: 65 pages, with 71 illustrations (4 color)
Preface by Maxime Préaud, Conservateur Général, Départment des Estampes, Bibliothèque nationale de France.
By: Erik Desmazières
Notes: 20 pages. Softcover, staple bound with stiff illustrated paper covers. Published for the exhibition at Telfair Museum of Art, in 2009. Includes Etching "Entrance Hall with Globe".
By: Erik Desmazières
Medium: Etching, aquatint & roulette
Edition: Signed, dated and numbered from the edition of 50
ImageSize: 10 x 8.66 inches
SheetSize: 10.63 x 9.05 inches
Year: 2019
By: Erik Desmazières
Notes: The catalogue Voyage au centre de la bibliothèque accompanied an exhibition in 2012 of the work by Erik Desmazières, at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BnF). Through a selection of prints, preparatory drawings and paintings, the artist delivers an exceptional vision of the national library as it was redeEdition: Signed by the architect Henri Labrouste in the 19th century.
Erik Desmazières has long been inspired by libraries, be they real or imaginary. Also attracted by architecture, the artist could only be fascinated by the National Library, expanded and renovated by Henri Labrouste under the second Empire. Inspired by the iron and glass architecture, he faithfully recreates the proportions of the majestic room while also conveying the atmosphere of a cozy place, full of silent readers.
By: Erik Desmazières
Medium: Etching, roulette and aquatint on thin old Japanese paper
Image Size: 20.2 x 27 cm (with edges)
Edition : 100 copies
Year: 2007
Includes the deluxe edition of the catalogue "Les Lieux imaginaires d’Érik Desmazières / Érik Desmazières Imaginary places" create for the exhibition at Musée Jenisch, Cabinet cantonal des Estampes, Vevey.