A COLOURFUL new twist on Bradford’s iconic architecture makes up a new exhibition starting at an art gallery today.

Printing the City has seen over 50 artists use Risograph Printing to create quirky images of the city, and the prints are now on display at Thornton’s South Square Gallery.

Structures like Salts Mill, the Shipley Clock Tower and the NCP car park on Hall Ings are among the buildings captured in the exhibition.

Other images feature some of the city’s old mills, pubs and office blocks, and one image even re-creates an old poster for Brown Muffs department store.

Other landmarks include the city’s un-loved High Point office block on Westgate and the Fibres sculpture at Forster Square Station.

The works include photos highlighted with bright colours, bringing a pop art feel to these everyday images of the city.

It has been put together by graphic designer Ben Holden, who is based at South Square. He has used a recently purchased Risograph printer, first released in Japan in the 1980s, to create posters for numerous events in Bradford and Leeds, but this marks his first exhibition.

The machine, manufactured by the Riso Kagaku Corporation, was built for high speed digital duplication, but in recent years have been used more and more by artists.

The printer uses drums containing soy based ink, and parts constructed from banana skins, and although the equipment looks like a normal photocopier, it gives the aesthetic of screen printing, although much easier, quicker and cheaper.

All the images in the exhibition have been created from just five colours, blue, red, black, green and florescent pink.

When the exhibition was announced, a call was put out to local and international artists, and some of the pieces have been submitted from as far as San Francisco.

Mr Holden said: “It is a bit like a digital screen print. It is quick, fast and sustainable. It is quite cheap to make images this way.

“We have over 60 prints from over 50 artists in this exhibition. Some submitted the images they wanted to display over Instagram, they were submitted from all over the world.

“Most of them have a link to Bradford, that was the brief we gave the artists. The idea was to respond to the architecture of Bradford, although not every piece is architecturally based.”

One of the images not based on buildings features a re-print of an old photo of Mr Bradford - 1968, only with the men all wearing bright pink trunks.

Mr Holden started designing prints when in a band, when he would produce their concert posters. It was then he found his calling.

He said: “People would come to me and ask if I could do their concert posters.

“This is my first exhibition so that is quite exciting.

“With only using five colours it can be quite limiting, but you can use that limitation, and it leads to some very unique images.

“The architecture of Bradford was a good starting point, a point of reference for the artists. If it was just an exhibition of random Risograph prints I don’t people would be as interested.”

Printing the City follows on from another exhibition celebrating Bradford’s architecture. Nancy Haslam-Chance’s exhibition A Dirty City shone a new light at the city’s derelict and forgotten buildings, as well as its industrial past, and ran at South Square in September.

The Printing in the City exhibition will begin with an evening event at the gallery tonight, running from 6pm to 9pm, and featuring food, drink, and live music from a Japanese synth pop band Kuunatic. There will also be a riso swatch book binding workshop.

It will then be fully open from tomorrow.

All the prints in the exhibition, which runs until late November, will be available to buy, and there will also be a collection of postcards on sale, featuring Bradford sights like The In Plaice fish and chip shop and Pizza Pieces in the Wool Exchange.

Print lovers will also be able to get to see the work of local artist’s at the city’s second print fair in November. The event will be held at Oastler Shopping Centre on November 25. Organisers Katie Holmes and Anna Parker are also holding an exhibition preview at the Sparrow Bier Cafe on North Parade on Thursday. The event will feature work by artists who took part in the first print fair, held in July, and will start at 7.30pm.