Biography
Fabiola Gil Alares is a Spanish mokuhanga printmaker, teacher, and author who is one of the principal figures responsible for the contemporary expansion of Japanese woodblock practice in the Spanish-speaking world. Birth and death dates have not been published in the available sources. She is based in Zaragoza, in Aragón, where she runs an independent xylography studio (Estudio Fabiola Gil) dedicated to the mokuhanga technique. Part of her training was acquired in Japan: in 2019 she was invited by David Bull to develop her work at Mokuhankan, his Tokyo publishing house and woodblock workshop, which over the past decade has functioned as one of the most important training environments for non-Japanese mokuhanga practitioners.
Her best-known contribution to the medium is the book MokuHanga: Manual ilustrado de xilografía japonesa, which she first presented in 2021 and which appeared in an expanded edition from Prensas de la Universidad de Zaragoza in 2023. Running to more than two hundred colour pages, it includes a historical and artistic introduction by David Almazán, the University of Zaragoza Japanese-art specialist, and technical collaboration from the master printer Gōto Hidehiko, with paper documentation supplied by the Awagami Factory in Tokushima Prefecture. Widely recognized as the first comprehensive manual on mokuhanga method in Spanish, it has become the principal reference on the technique in any language other than Japanese and English.
Beyond the book, her studio practice includes original editions in a graphic, narrative idiom — flat colour areas, decorative outlines, and a romantic register closer to illustration than to traditional kachō-e. Her teaching activity includes the Japanese-xylography workshops 'De la tinta al moku-hanga' (beginner and advanced levels) at the Fundación BilbaoArte, and she is an active presence in the international mokuhanga community that has grown around the post-2010 revival of the technique. Museum holdings of her work have not been comprehensively documented; the principal repository for the book and its study editions is the University of Zaragoza, and her place in the contemporary record is best characterized as that of an author-teacher whose pedagogical reach in the Spanish language is currently without peer in the medium.
Key Facts
- Nationality
- 🇪🇸Spain
- Movement
- Contemporary Mokuhanga
- Works Indexed
- 6
Frequently Asked Questions
Fabiola Gil Alares is a Spanish mokuhanga printmaker, teacher, and author who is one of the principal figures responsible for the contemporary expansion of Japanese woodblock practice in the Spanish-speaking world. Birth and death dates have not been published in the available sources. She is based in Zaragoza, in Aragón, where she runs an independent xylography studio (Estudio Fabiola Gil) dedicated to the mokuhanga technique. Part of her training was acquired in Japan: in 2019 she was invited by David Bull to develop her work at Mokuhankan, his Tokyo publishing house and woodblock workshop, which over the past decade has functioned as one of the most important training environments for non-Japanese mokuhanga practitioners.
Fabiola Gil Alares's work was shaped by the Contemporary Mokuhanga tradition in Japanese woodblock printmaking. Contemporary Mokuhanga: Contemporary mokuhanga (literally "wood-block print") encompasses artists working from approximately 1970 to the present who continue or reinvent traditional Japanese woodblock printing techniques.
