Miriam Zegrer

Miriam Zegrer (b. 1970, Germany) is a German printmaker and educator 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. The druckstelle studio teaches intaglio, Japanese woodblock, and screen printing, and has hosted numerous mokuhanga workshops with visiting international artists.

During the druckstelle years Zegrer extended her technical range, studying non-toxic intaglio with Henrik Boegh in Copenhagen and Japanese woodblock printing with the American mokuhanga artist April Vollmer. Her mokuhanga specialisation deepened further through a study trip to Kyoto with the artist Haruka Furusaka and the master printer Kitamura, where she undertook intensive training in the traditional water-based woodblock technique. The experience produced a sustained shift in her practice toward mokuhanga as her central medium. 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 2005 IMPACT printmaking conference the druckstelle circle convened an international group of artists committed to Japanese woodblock printing, forming the 'Nagasawa 10' exchange — a circle of European, North American, and Japanese mokuhanga artists, many of them alumni of the Nagasawa Art Park woodblock residency in Japan, who exchanged plates, paper, and prints across continents. The group later grew into the 'Nagasawa 14,' the collective vehicle behind a series of international mokuhanga exchange portfolios produced over 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, and Aleksander Wozniak, with Cindi Ettinger contributing the wood-relief-and-letterpress colophon.

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' (l'atelier dans la valise) — a portable mokuhanga teaching kit that she carries to host studios in a number of countries. Together with her cooperation projects with workshops and artists abroad, this portable-workshop model has helped make druckstelle and the DruckAtelier well-known fixtures of the German mokuhanga-and-engraving scene.

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 overlays that mokuhanga's water-based printing produces, with attention to the traditional kento-registered colour structure. Her work circulates through the exhibition programmes of druckstelle and the DruckAtelier in Berlin.

Within the contemporary international mokuhanga community Zegrer is a leading German voice alongside Eva Pietzcker, and her co-founding of druckstelle, her role in the Nagasawa exchange, and her portable-workshop projects together make her an active figure in the European mokuhanga revival of the twenty-first century. Her training with the Kyoto master printer Kitamura and her ongoing collaborations with Japanese partners such as Haruka Furusaka connect her to the German-Japanese print exchange that has grown out of Berlin's engraving and woodblock studio scene since 2001.