Kali Gandaki

The Kali Gandaki gorge cuts between Nepal's Annapurna and Dhaulagiri massifs, forming one of the deepest river canyons in the world. Summers, who travelled repeatedly through the Himalayas in the late 1970s and 1980s, would have recorded the river's dark glacial water threading through the towering rock walls. This print likely renders the gorge as a vertical composition, the river a slim band of saturated indigo or vermillion set against sun-bleached cliff faces. Summers eschewed the Western press in favour of a hand-rubbed method closer in spirit to the Japanese baren, laying the inked plywood block face-up and pressing the absorbent sheet from above. The signature halations along his colour edges came from spraying solvent through the back of the paper, drawing pigment outward into a soft bleed that mimics atmospheric haze. Kali Gandaki sits within the Himalayan cycle that anchored the second half of his career, alongside Tilicho Lake and the Gorkha works, all of which translate the high-altitude landscapes of Nepal into the stilled, meditative idiom for which his colour woodcuts are known.