Primavera: Hagar and the Angels in the Wilderness

Five-panel woodcut polyptych from 2021. The title joins "Primavera" (Italian for spring) with the Genesis 21 narrative of Hagar, Sarah's Egyptian handmaid cast out with her son Ishmael into the desert of Beersheba, where an angel appeared near a well to save them from thirst. The polyptych format extends the wilderness setting across a wide horizontal field, allowing landscape and figures to unfold sequentially across the five matrices rather than compressing into a single frame. Religious narrative — particularly Old Testament episodes shared across Abrahamic traditions — recurs throughout Poskovic's contemporary woodcut practice. The seasonal subtitle reframes the angelic encounter as a moment of regeneration rather than abandonment. Works at this scale require multiple registrations and successive overprintings on heavy paper, building color through layered passes from large carved blocks. The use of monumental religious subject matter in the woodcut medium aligns Poskovic's polyptych practice with both the European altarpiece lineage and the multi-panel byōbu screen tradition of East Asia.