Yuko Iwakiri

Yuko Iwakiri (岩切裕子, born 1961 in Tokyo) is a Japanese woodcut printmaker based in Tokyo. She completed her graduate studies in woodblock printmaking at Tama Art University (Tamabi) in 1988 — one of the principal Japanese art universities for printmaking — and quickly established herself within the country's print-association circuit.

Iwakiri's career has been closely tied to the Japan Print Association (Nihon Hanga Kyōkai). She received the association's prize at its annual exhibition in 1988 and was recommended as an associate member, won its 60th-anniversary commemorative award in 1992, and was elevated to full membership after further recognition in 1996. Earlier, in 1987, her work was acquired through a purchase prize at the University Print Exhibition held at the Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts, and in 1989 she was named a domestic research fellow by the Agency for Cultural Affairs. In 2001 the Agency for Cultural Affairs again selected one of her prints for its collection of outstanding contemporary works. She is a member of both the Japan Print Association and the Japan Artists Association (Nihon Bijutsuka Renmei).

Her prints have circulated through national and international exhibition channels, including Korea–Japan and US–Japan contemporary print exchanges in the late 1980s and the CWAJ Print Show, the long-running Tokyo showcase of contemporary Japanese prints. From 1990 onward she held a sequence of solo exhibitions at the Shirota Gallery in Ginza, Tokyo, a gallery long associated with the print medium.

Working in colour woodcut built up from many registered blocks and successive layers of water-based ink, Iwakiri is known for quietly atmospheric imagery — dome-shaped buildings edged with checks and stripes, and stands of mysterious, densely worked trees. Works such as "The Quartette," a woodcut of forest trees, and "toward the sea" are characteristic of a practice that treats the print less as a reproduction than as a built-up, painterly surface.