Biography
Miriam Zegrer (b. 1970, Germany) is a German printmaker, educator, and gallerist whose practice is centered on Japanese woodblock printing (mokuhanga) and on building infrastructure for the medium in continental Europe. She trained in Avignon, France, in the 1990s, completing her Diplôme National Supérieur d'Expression Plastique (DNSEP) at the Beaux-Arts d'Avignon, and moved to Berlin in 1997. In Berlin she trained in the engraving workshops of the Bundesverband Bildender Künstlerinnen und Künstler (BBK) and in 2001 co-founded the printmaking studio 'druckstelle' with Eva Pietzcker — a partnership that has been one of the most productive German-Japanese print-exchange channels of the 21st century. The druckstelle studio teaches intaglio, Japanese woodblock, and screen printing, and has hosted numerous mokuhanga workshops with visiting Japanese masters and international guest artists.
Zegrer's mokuhanga specialisation deepened through a study trip to Japan with Haruka Furusaka and master Kitamura in Kyoto, where she undertook intensive training in the traditional water-based woodblock printing technique. The trip produced a sustained shift in her practice toward mokuhanga as her central medium of interest. In 2009 she founded the DruckAtelier, a complementary studio focused on wood engraving and the production of artist books, extending the mokuhanga vocabulary into German-language artist-book and bookbinding contexts.
At the IMPACT engraving conference in 2005 the druckstelle convened an international group of artists committed to Japanese woodblock printing, founding the 'Nagasawa 10' exchange — initially ten European, North American, and Japanese mokuhanga artists who exchanged plates, paper, and prints across continents. Nagasawa 10 expanded to Nagasawa 14, the principal collective vehicle for the international mokuhanga exchange portfolios that have run for nearly two decades. The 2021 'NOIR / KURO' Nagasawa 14 exchange portfolio coordinated by Nel Pak and Michael Reed included Zegrer alongside Yoonmi Nam, April Vollmer, Eva Pietzcker, Hiroki Satake, Haruka Furusaka, Daniel Heyman, Henrik Hey, Dariusz Kaca, Katie Baldwin, Jacomijn den Engelsen, Michael Reed, and Aleksander Wozniak. Cindi Ettinger contributed the wood-relief-and-letterpress colophon for the portfolio.
Beyond the studio and exchange-portfolio work, Zegrer has built a continuing programme of international workshop projects under the rubric 'the workshop in a suitcase' — a portable mokuhanga teaching kit that travels to host studios in France, Switzerland, Belgium, Brazil, and Japan. The portable workshop format has been one of the most-replicated organizational innovations in the European mokuhanga scene, and it explicitly mirrors the historical mobility of Japanese block-cutters and printers in the Edo period. Cooperation projects with workshops and artists across multiple countries have made the druckstelle the most-cited German mokuhanga-and-engraving studio of the early 21st century.
Zegrer's own prints engage the mokuhanga medium with a distinctive German-Romantic sensibility — landscape and natural-form motifs rendered through the layered transparent ink overlay that mokuhanga's water-based printing produces, with attention to the traditional kento-registered colour structure. Her output is held in continuing rotation through the druckstelle gallery (Berlin Kreuzberg) and the DruckAtelier exhibition programme. The artist is internationally circulated through ArtFacts (artfacts.net/artist/miriam-zegrer/226246) and the gallery exhibition record of druckstelle and DruckAtelier.
Within the contemporary international mokuhanga community Zegrer is the principal German voice — alongside Eva Pietzcker — and her co-founding of druckstelle, the Nagasawa exchange convocation, and the portable-workshop infrastructure together place her at the centre of the European mokuhanga revival of the 21st century. Her sustained engagement with Kyoto-based mokuhanga master Kitamura and her ongoing collaborations with Japanese partners (notably Haruka Furusaka of Kucyusansou) make her one of the principal anchors of the German-Japanese print-exchange relationship that has developed through Berlin's engraving and woodblock studio scene since 2001.
Key Facts
- Active Period
- 1970
- Nationality
- 🇩🇪Germany
- Movement
- Contemporary Mokuhanga
Frequently Asked Questions
Miriam Zegrer (b. 1970, Germany) is a German printmaker, educator, and gallerist whose practice is centered on Japanese woodblock printing (mokuhanga) and on building infrastructure for the medium in continental Europe. She trained in Avignon, France, in the 1990s, completing her Diplôme National Supérieur d'Expression Plastique (DNSEP) at the Beaux-Arts d'Avignon, and moved to Berlin in 1997. In Berlin she trained in the engraving workshops of the Bundesverband Bildender Künstlerinnen und Künstler (BBK) and in 2001 co-founded the printmaking studio 'druckstelle' with Eva Pietzcker — a partnership that has been one of the most productive German-Japanese print-exchange channels of the 21st century. The druckstelle studio teaches intaglio, Japanese woodblock, and screen printing, and has hosted numerous mokuhanga workshops with visiting Japanese masters and international guest artists.
Miriam Zegrer was active born in 1970. They were associated with the Contemporary Mokuhanga movement.
Miriam Zegrer'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.