Founded in 2003 in Tampa, Florida by Master Printer, publisher, and artist Erika Greenberg-Schneider, Bleu Acier is a collaborative atelier, exhibition space, and research-driven platform dedicated to contemporary printmaking, artists’ books, drawing, and sculpture. Rooted in the traditions of fine art publishing while engaged with contemporary interdisciplinary practice, Bleu Acier functions as a structured intellectual and visual ecosystem where material investigation, artistic collaboration, and cultural transmission intersect.
After living and working in Paris for over twenty years, Greenberg-Schneider established Bleu Acier as a space where artists, designers, thinkers and her own artistic practice could engage with the expanded possibilities of printmaking and sculptural process. The atelier specializes in Intaglio, Photogravure, Stone Lithography, Relief, Monotype, and experimental collaborative approaches that extend beyond conventional definitions of the print.
The name Bleu Acier derives from Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, in which Louis describes “a chain whirling round, round, in a steel blue circle beneath.” The reference also evokes the moment steel turns blue under extreme heat, just before transformation, a condition that parallels the studio’s commitment to process, experimentation, and emergence.
Bleu Acier collaborates with artists on limited editions, multiples, sculptures, and artists’ books that retain the conceptual and material rigor of their broader practice. Rather than functioning as reproductions, these works are conceived as integral extensions of an artist’s oeuvre. Published artists include Dominique Labauvie, Richard Dupont, Pierre Mabille, Bernar Venet, Paula Scher, Joe Fyfe, Sylvie Eyberg, Stefan Sagmeister, Noelle Mason, Sopheap Pich, William Douglas, among others. In addition to its own publishing projects, Bleu Acier collaborates with galleries, institutions, artists, and independent publishers on specialized commissions and collaborative research projects.
As a collaborative Master Printer, Erika Greenberg-Schneider has worked with artists including Roberto Matta, Jean Dubuffet, Pierre Alechinsky, Beverly Pepper, Georg Baselitz, Keith Haring, Chuck Close, Jonathan Horowitz, and Jane Hammond. In 2011, she was Knighted by the French Government as Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres for advancing French cultural exchange.
Today, Bleu Acier continues to evolve as a site of artistic production, experimentation, pedagogy, and interdisciplinary dialogue — bridging sculpture, drawing, printmaking, and publishing through sustained material and collaborative inquiry.
"I am drawn to artists who investigate what lies beneath the visible. Whether through line, language, memory, landscape, the body, or systems of representation, these artists reveal the hidden structures that shape our understanding of the world."
--Erika Greenberg-Schneider