Sand City
- Medium:
- Woodblock print
- Edition:
- Self-printed
- Source:
- wbp
Description
"Sand City" is one of Kitaoka's more enigmatic recurring subjects — an imagined urban environment built of shifting, impermanent material that evokes both ancient desert architecture and a dream geography. The composition layers geometric structures: blocky rooflines, tower forms, the suggestion of streets and shadows, all rendered in the warm ochres and pale tans of sand and sun. It belongs to the modernist tradition of the invented city as spiritual or psychological landscape, Kitaoka using the woodblock's sharp geometry to build a place that exists fully as image rather than record.
More Prints by Fumio Kitaoka
More Urban Scenes Prints
A Hundred Shades of Ink of Edo: Kiyonaga's Pipe (Edo zumi hyaku shoku: Kiyonaga no kiseru)
Woodblock print
View of Kabuki Theater from Matsuya (Ginza Matsuya yori Kabukiza), no. 3 from the series "Pictures of Ginza, First Series (Gashu Ginza dai isshu)"
1928
Color lithograph
Distant View of Mitsukoshi Movie Theater in Shinjuku from the Sixth Floor of Hoteiya (Hoteiya rokkai kara Shinjuku Mitsukoshi Musashi no kan enbo zu), no. 1 from the series "Scenery of Shinjuku (Gashu Shinjuku fukei)"
1930
Color lithograph
Spring Dusk at the Tōshō Shrine in Ueno
1948
Woodblock print, ink and color on paper
Featured in Collections
Curated cross-cuts that include this print.
Frequently Asked Questions
Sand City was created by Fumio Kitaoka (北岡文雄).
Sand City depicts urban scenes.