House In Switzerland
- Medium:
- Mokuhanga (Japanese woodblock)
- Image courtesy of
- Saru Gallery
House in Switzerland records, in Hodaka Yoshida's reduced architectural vocabulary, a chalet or alpine dwelling encountered during his European travels. Compositions in this mode typically present the house frontally or in three-quarter view, the pitched roof, gable, and façade abstracted into discrete color planes carved as separate blocks and printed in sequence. The mokuhanga process on [washi](/glossary/washi) gives the building's edges the precision of a hard-edge painting while retaining the soft fibrous quality of hand-pulled woodblock printing. Hodaka's Swiss subjects belong to the same line of inquiry as his Italian, Mexican, and Indian architectural prints: vernacular built form treated as a vocabulary of geometric primitives. The work also marks a distinct departure from his father Hiroshi's European prints — the Venice and Swiss landscape sheets of the 1920s — which framed the same continent through atmospheric naturalism. Hodaka instead extracts the architecture and reprints it as a flattened, modernist sign.
Curated cross-cuts that include this print.
House In Switzerland was created by Hodaka Yoshida (吉田穂高).
