If you walk into an art gallery or go through their catalogue, chances are you would find a section reserved for reproduced artwork. It would come under the strange sounding name, giclée (pronounced zhee-clay). What exactly is giclée, you might wonder.

Giclée is a type of digital fine-art inkjet print, usually reproductions of artwork originally created in traditional media (paintings, drawing, and so on). Before the era of high quality digital printing, fine art prints were usually produced by conventional four-color offset lithography. Since the 1990s, that role has been taken over by giclée printing.

History:

In the late 1980s, the digital printing pioneers were looking for a new identity for the beautiful prints they had worked so hard to achieve.  They wanted a distinction between their artistic work and the commercial pre-press proofs churned out by IRIS printers.

Initially, IRIS prints were not quite topnotch. Their color fastness was doubtful, and the prints tended to fade within a few years. It was also not possible to achieve a completely smooth transition of color gradients, so important for reproducing artwork. After all, they were used mainly to match colors before the mass scale print run.