Lady No. 9

Lady No. 9 (1975) belongs to Hagiwara's Female Figure series, in which the human form was abstracted and distilled into the essential visual qualities of feminine presence — posture, proportion, the relationship between figure and ground. By 1975, Hagiwara's carved surfaces had achieved a sophistication that allowed him to suggest human form through the marks of the cutting tool itself, the figure emerging from the texture of the block as much as from deliberate draftsmanship. The numbered series indicates sustained investigation of the female form across multiple prints.