Blue and White Space. No. 305

Created in 1972, this print titled "Blue and White Space No. 305" belongs to an earlier phase of Funasaka's career when he was actively developing the geometric formal language that would sustain his practice for decades. The title explicitly names the two colors and the spatial concept that organize the composition: blue and white, the most basic chromatic contrast after black and white, used to define and articulate pictorial space. The restrictive palette forces attention onto the shapes themselves and their spatial relationships, stripping away the distractions of complex color interaction. Catalog number 305 places this as a mid-career work in Funasaka's numbering system, well past the experimental early works but several hundred compositions before the refined maturity of the 1980s. The limited color palette aligns with the reductive impulse that drove much postwar abstract art in Japan.