Reika Iwami

Reika Iwami (岩見禮花, 1927-2020) transformed woodblock printing into something closer to sculpture. Born in Tokyo in 1927, she spent much of her early life on the island of Kyushu. She studied at Bunka Gakuin and spent some eleven years learning doll-making under Ryūjo Hori before turning to woodblock printmaking in the mid-1950s, studying with Kōshirō Onchi, the leading figure of the sōsaku-hanga (creative print) movement. She combined deep embossing with metallic leaf and monochrome pigments to make prints that shimmer and shift as the viewer moves.

Her signature works evoke water in motion. She returned again and again to water, drawing flowing patterns out of the natural grain and texture of the wood itself and pressing relief embossing so deeply into the paper that the prints acquired a three-dimensional surface. 'Round Shadow No. 1' (1957), now in the Art Institute of Chicago, is characteristic of her vocabulary of circular and flowing forms rendered through texture as much as line. Her palette was deliberately restrained, favoring monochrome compositions and sumi black set against gold and silver, so that the play of light across the relief surface became the primary visual event.

Iwami exhibited internationally from the 1950s onward, showing at major print biennials and at the College Women's Association of Japan (CWAJ) exhibitions. The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the British Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago all acquired her work. She joined the Nihon Hanga Kyōkai (Japan Print Association) in 1955 and exhibited regularly in its shows, and in 1957 she was among the co-founders of the Joryū Hanga Kyōkai, an association formed to promote the work of women printmakers.

What set Iwami apart was her insistence that printmaking could engage touch and reflected light, not merely vision. Where many printmakers worked toward ever-greater graphic precision, she moved in the opposite direction, toward near-monochrome surfaces whose meaning emerged from physical depth and the behavior of light on metallic pigments. One of the first women to win wide recognition in the sōsaku-hanga world, she continued to make prints late in her life, paring her water motifs down to quiet, luminous undulations. She died in 2020, leaving a body of work that occupies a singular position between printmaking, relief sculpture, and meditation on natural phenomena.