Yulia_Navalnaya

A water-based woodblock portrait of Yulia Navalnaya, the Russian opposition figure and widow of Alexei Navalny, who has continued public political work since his death in 2024. Like the other prints in Andrea G. Artz's portrait sequence, the work begins from a digital photograph and is carried into mokuhanga through the standard sequence: colour separation, the carving of a key block for the principal contours, the cutting of additional blocks for each tonal field, and hand printing in registration on washi with a baren and pigments bound in nori. Bokashi gradations stand in for photographic shading. The translation removes the immediacy of news photography and replaces it with a layered, hand-registered image. Within Artz's wider practice, which spans photography, collage, folded paper sculpture, and installation, the print sits among portraits of public figures whose likenesses circulate through digital media, and which the woodblock returns to the slower, single-sheet conditions of analogue print.