Fine Art Giclée print Galleries

What is Giclée?

(pronounced "zhee-clay") is an invented name for the process of making fine art prints from a digital source using ink-jet printing. The word "giclée" is derived from the French language word "le gicleur" meaning "nozzle", or more specifically "gicler" meaning "to squirt, spurt, or spray". It was coined in 1991 by Jack Duganne, a printmaker working in the field, to represent any inkjet-based digital print used as fine art. The intent of that name was to distinguish commonly known industrial "Iris proofs" from the type of fine art prints artists were producing on those same types of printers. The name was originally applied to fine art prints created on Iris printers in a process invented in the early 1990s but has since come to mean any high quality ink-jet print and is often used in galleries and print shops to denote such prints.

Artists tend to use these types of inkjet printing processes commonly called "Giclée" to make reproductions of their original two-dimensional artwork, photographs or computer generated art. Professionally produced inkjet prints are much more expensive on a “per print” basis than the traditional four color offset lithography process originally used to make such reproductions (a large format inkjet can cost more than $50 a print, not including scanning and color correction, as opposed to $5 a print for a four-color offset litho of the same image printed in a run of 1000). However, since the artist does not need to pay for market and store large print runs, and since the artist can print and sell each print individually to match demand, inkjet printing is used as an economical alternative to producing large runs of four color offset prints. Inkjet printing has the added advantage of allowing the artist to control every aspect of the image, its color and the substrate printed on, and even allows the artist to own and operate the printer itself.