Work

"Work" is the generic title Hodaka Yoshida used throughout the late 1950s and 1960s for compositions that pushed the family studio's craft inheritance toward non-objective abstraction. Expect a layered field of geometric shapes — rectangles, bands, and irregular polygons — printed from multiple cherry-wood blocks onto kozo washi, with each block registered to lay one flat color against the next. Hodaka favored opaque, saturated pigments mixed with rice paste and pulled by hand with a baren, the same technique his father Hiroshi used for the Sailing Boats series, here redirected to formal rather than representational ends. Surface texture is integral: the grain of the block reads through pale areas, and overprinted blocks build up subtle tonal density. Within Hodaka's output, prints titled simply "Work" sit alongside his Mexican-influenced and architectural series, marking the moments when he set narrative subject aside entirely to test composition, weight, and color relationships against the constraints of the woodblock medium.