Windows - Katsura

Katsura references the Katsura Imperial Villa, the seventeenth-century retreat in southwestern Kyoto celebrated for its restrained geometry and integration of architecture with garden. Karhu's "Windows - Katsura" focuses on the rhythmic interplay of shoji panels, wooden mullions, and the rectilinear divisions characteristic of the villa's sukiya-style construction. Composed with the flat planes and bold black outlines that defined his mature style, the print likely renders the lattice and paper screens as a near-abstract grid, with carefully balanced positive and negative space. Karhu typically reduced architectural subjects to their structural essentials, allowing the grain of the cherry block and the texture of washi to register through restrained color fields. As one of the few Western printmakers to gain standing within the Japanese print establishment, Karhu spent decades cataloguing Kyoto's architectural heritage, and his Katsura subjects connect to a wider sosaku-hanga interest in modernist composition drawn from traditional Japanese forms. The print belongs to a body of work that treated Kyoto's buildings as both historical record and exercises in pure design.