Cy Bernheim

Cy Bernheim is part of Andrea G. Artz's mokuhanga portrait series, in which photographic studies of named sitters are reconstructed through Japanese water-based woodblock printing. The process begins with the photograph rather than a drawn design: tonal and colour information is mapped onto a sequence of carved blocks, registered with kento marks so that successive impressions align on the sheet. Pigment is brushed onto each dampened block with rice paste and burnished into washi by baren, producing the slight halation and matte surface particular to hand-pulled prints. Where conventional bijin-ga or yakusha-e use the named figure to represent a recognisable cultural type, Artz's portraits resist that move, presenting each sitter as a specific individual whose likeness has migrated from camera capture to carved relief. The print belongs alongside her installation work, where photographic portraits are folded into filigree paper objects, as another iteration of her central question: how the figure persists across radical changes of medium and material.