Annalise Gratovich Carves Home at Monumental Scale

Gratovich trained at the University of Texas at Austin and works in woodcut, etching, relief, and collage — but her signature is a labor-intensive hand-dyed chine collé technique. She hand-carves the wood, hand-dyes mulberry paper in her studio, and lays the dyed paper into the print during pressing, building color and dimension layer by layer rather than with ink alone. As she describes the discovery: when she started her major series, she "really just saw them as black and white images, and then developed this process of dyeing the paper and doing this crazy, intricate chine collé, which is how they're colored."

The emotional engine of the work is Gratovich's own family story. She is the second-generation daughter of a Ukrainian war refugee, raised in the American South — a duality she puts plainly: "My father's a war refugee from Ukraine, he's a naturalized citizen, but I'm 100% Texan." Her figures derive from the matryoshka dolls she grew up with, and their garments carry patterns drawn from Ukrainian embroidery, conjuring nostalgia and places that can't be returned to.

Her largest body of work, Carrying Things From Home, is a suite of eight hand-dyed chine collé woodcuts measuring roughly three by five-and-a-half feet each — co-published with Austin's Flatbed Press. More recently, after periods of chronic illness, she has turned to collage as the work she could carry with her: "The collage was the work I could take with me when I had to leave home, work in bed, or during my hospitalizations." It's a body of work that keeps finding new ways to be about home, distance, and what we hold onto.

Her home base is annalisegratovich.com, where her portfolio and shop live, and she posts new work on Instagram at @annalisegratovich. Her prints are also carried by Flatbed Press in Austin and Paradigm Gallery + Studio.

About this spotlight: an independent, unpaid feature, written because we admire the work — drawn from public sources, including the artist's own statements, a 2024 Austin Chronicle profile, and her publisher Flatbed Press. All artwork and images are the artist's; see the work in full via the links above.