A King and Queen of Prints : The process allows artists to produce their master images from any surface or material

In the early 1970s, renowned Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo challenged Luis Remba to create art prints that would have texture.

Remba and his wife, Lea, owned a commercial printing shop in Mexico City then. During the day, invoices, stationery and magazines were printed. After 5 p.m., a master printer came to the shop, and any artist was invited to work with him to make lithographs using aluminum plates.

Tamayo’s challenge motivated Remba to experiment with various papers and printing processes.

“He would wake me up at 3 o’clock in the morning and say, ‘See what I did!’ ” Lea Remba recalled.

What Luis Remba did was invent a very flexible printing process that he called Mixografia. It allows artists to produce their master images from any surface or material they like, including plastic, wax, leaves, textiles, carpets and walls, as well as the traditional sources of wood, metal or stone. The resulting three-dimensional limited edition prints and monotypes register the precise detail of an artist’s master.

Remba brought Tamayo a wax plate and asked him to draw on it. Two weeks later, he presented the artist with a proof of the drawing, on artist’s paper, that embodied the texture he had requested.

“He was amazed by it,” Remba said. “Normally he was very controlled, but this time he gave me a hug and told me I was an engineer and an artist.”

Before his death in June, Tamayo created almost 80 Mixografia works at the Mexico City workshop. Several of his prints, and those of many other internationally known artists, are on view in downtown Los Angeles at the Mixografia Gallery/Workshop, which the Rembas established in 1984, and in Santa Monica at the new Remba Gallery, which they opened in September.

The Rembas have collaborated with Alberto Burri from Italy, Pierre Soulages and Arman from France, and Americans Jonathan Borofsky, Stanley Boxer, Laddie John Dill, Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Graham, Kenneth Noland and Larry Rivers.

On exhibit in the Santa Monica gallery is a show of Larry Rivers’ paintings, sculpture and graphic reliefs produced for him by the Mixografia workshop, including “Make Believe Ballroom.” This three-dimensional lithograph depicts Fred Astaire dancing with Rita Hayworth.

“We enjoy challenges from artists,” Remba said. “They don’t have to adapt their ways of working for us because the process is very flexible. We can integrate anything into a copper plate made from the master in reverse form. Artists work in a positive format, making the master in their own studios, if they prefer.”

A Mixografia print can be as large as 20 feet by 6 feet by 3 inches thick, on one piece of paper from a single printing plate. The Rembas produce their own 100% cotton paper from a paper mill in their downtown workshop.

“As we began to work with more textures, we had a problem with regular paper--it broke during embossing,” Luis Remba said.

“Our son was also a mechanical engineering student,” Lea Remba added. “He designed a beater to beat the fibers, giving quality and strength to the paper.”

Ever the inventor, Luis Remba developed a sculptural process (originally for Henry Moore) that he called Mixocast. This technique produces multiple metal bas-reliefs and registers the subtle details of the sculpture.

He has also recently devised a Freepoint printing process that substitutes for the traditional dry-point method and Soft-Etching, which has the qualities of mezzotints, aquatints, engravings and etchings. Both processes are achieved without the use of harmful chemicals or acids.

“Larry Rivers: 3D Works” at the Remba Gallery, 918 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, through Jan. 10. Open 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays. Call (310) 576-1011.

A COMMUNITY OF WOMEN: Nancy Pierson’s large charcoal-on-paper drawings of women, on view at the Ovsey Gallery, defy categorization.

“They are very curious, very mysterious,” gallery director Neil Ovsey said. “What they talk about is new, but they don’t look new. They have a timeless edge.”

The drawings depict middle-aged women in groups of two, three or four who are unidentifiable with any particular era or decade. While they seem to convey the notion of community among women, the women in each drawing do not relate directly to one another. Instead, each woman appears caught up in her own activity, or perhaps even a personal agenda.

In “Good Wives,” the women are in a circle, holding hands with great intensity, possibly holding on to each other for survival. Hands are prominent in all of the drawings, whether it is of one woman giving support to another with a gentle touch, women who stand formally while performing a song in “Chinese Paper” or women in costume representing an organization in “Members of the Guild.”

Pierson began this series with a small oil on canvas painting of two women singing, called “Mothers Opera I.” The title refers to the emotions that come with new motherhood. Almost two years ago, at age 40, she gave birth to her first child.

“It was a radical change in my life,” Pierson said. “I found it isolating. And I entered middle age at the same time.

“I was thrown into the company of women, and it was like going back to high school. We had nothing in common except motherhood. The company of women is intense, emotional and wonderful, but becoming part of this secret society of women is an outcome of being a new parent that I hadn’t anticipated.

“I’m interested in the chemistry of women as friends, their emotional relationships and competitiveness about their children and being good mothers. My work comes out of that.”

“Nancy Pierson: New Drawings” at Ovsey Gallery, 126 N. La Brea Ave., Los Angeles, through Dec. 21. Open 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays to Saturdays. Call (213) 935-1883. “SHADOW AND SUBSTANCE”: Last winter, the National Council of Jewish Women in Los Angeles re-covered the walls of its center. “We have a big building and lots of wall space, and we know how hard it is for women to get space in a gallery. We said, ‘Why don’t we provide an alternative space for women artists to show their work?’ ” said Anne Berman, the organization’s communications director.

The center presented its first exhibition in March. A photography show followed in June. Its current exhibit, “Dreams and Reality/Shadow and Substance,” a multimedia show of 43 works by 19 artists, graces the walls with powerful and emotional images of women’s experience and outlook on life.

“We were looking for political and social expression, for a view of the world from women’s experience, especially when it was a view of violence, war and disease,” Berman said. The artwork was chosen from 700 slides submitted by 140 artists to a nine-person jury that included Los Angeles County Museum of Art 20th-Century curator Stephanie Barron and gallery owner Ruth Bachofner.

Virginia Halstead used oil pastel and pencil on paper to create her whimsical yet weighty pictures of a woman “Facing Surgery” and in “Over Her Head.”

German-born Marion Daus Kyle uses her art--paintings such as the abstract “Holocaust” and the non-representational “A Summer’s Night’s Dream”--to channel her anger over the Holocaust. Using plastic as her surface, Florence Rosen has juxtaposed drawings of soldiers and an enumeration of troop counts in European countries at the time of World War I with pictures of her four grown but youthful sons in “What Is Power?”

Betsy Noorzay’s bitingly satirical “Cafeteria,” a mixed media work, represents her own experience with mastectomy. Accompanying this work is Noorzay’s brooding painting “Radiation.”

Not to be missed is Leslie Ernst’s “Litany for Three Stalls,” focusing on female behavior and body image, which has been installed in the women’s bathroom.

Artists Jo Andersen, Nancy Hall Brooks, Nancy Calef, Elana Chaitman, Liesbeth Heikens, C. Parker-Lopez, Rachelle Mark, Kathi Martin, Nancy L. McCallum, Liane McDonell, Louise M. Olson, Linda Jo Russell, Franceska Schifrin and Lorraine Serena are also represented in the show.

“Dreams and Reality/Shadow and Substance,” at the National Council of Jewish Women/LA’s Women’s Center, 543 N. Fairfax Ave . , Los Angeles, through Jan. 17. Open 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and 8:30 a.m. to 8 p.m. Tuesday and Thursday. The exhibition is open by appointment on weekends to groups of 20 or more. Call Anne Berman, (213) 651-2930.