Beige Wall
- Medium:
- Zinc photoetching and woodblock print, ink and color on paper
- Dimensions:
- 86 × 127.6 cm
- Source:
- Minneapolis Institute of Art
Beige Wall, produced by Hodaka Yoshida in 1992, belongs to the artist's sustained late-career series of wall-surface prints, which by the early 1990s had become one of the most concentrated subjects of his mature program. The composition is organized as a close-in view of a beige plastered or painted wall, its surface registered through layered passages of ochre, off-white, and faint warmer tones, broken by carved striations, patches of photographic-transfer texture, and small concentrated marks that suggest cracks, stains, posted notices long since removed, or other residues of human use. There is no implied architecture or figure beyond the wall itself; the printed surface and the wall surface are aligned so closely that one can stand in for the other. This treatment is consistent with the technical hybridity that distinguished Hodaka's mature practice — combining traditional woodblock with photographic transfer, etching, and combined-media processes — and the wall prints are perhaps the clearest sustained demonstration of that program. As the second son of Hiroshi Yoshida and the painter Fujio Yoshida, half-brother to Toshi Yoshida, Hodaka had positioned himself for decades against the Yoshida-family landscape tradition, aligning instead with international postwar abstraction in which the worked surface itself was the proper subject of the print. The Minneapolis Institute of Art, which holds this impression in its collection of modern Japanese prints (https://collections.artsmia.org/art/142353), preserves Beige Wall within a substantial holding of his late wall prints and their companions. For students of the postwar Japanese print, the 1992 sheet is a particularly clear example of how Hodaka could elevate a near-blank wall to a fully developed abstract subject, the carved and transferred surface of the print mirroring the accumulated, weathered surface of its referent.
Curated cross-cuts that include this print.
Beige Wall was created by Hodaka Yoshida (吉田穂高).
Beige Wall measures 86 × 127.6 cm.
