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Since his days in art school Lothar Osterburg has primarily made his living by working as a master printer. He started out working in Lithography but switched exclusively to intaglio (etching) after having been a master printer at Crown Point Press in San Francisco(1989-93). It was there he first started working with photogravure on a project with Christian Boltanski. Since then he has completed hundreds of photogravure projects with a wide range of artists as well as many platemaking projects for other printers and publishers.

In 1994 he relocated to New York were he established his own workshop in West Chelsea. In 2004 he moved to a larger studio in the Gownus area of Brooklyn and finally moved to the Hudson Valley where he has been since the beginning of 2016. Most of the artist’s he works with know little or nothing about the technical possibilities of achieving their desired result in this process. In his collaborations Osterburg provides the artists with judgment-free advice on the possibilities of the process, assists them in making the plates, and finally prints the editions. In this environment the artists feel free to develop the ideas for their work without any technical limitations or artistic interference by the collaborator. This division of labor has been used for centuries in artistic processes that require a mastery of technical skills. Many of these masters are artists themselves, a fact that most artists they work with never know.