Sample lithograph 01 (Borges-themed series)

This print belongs to Hoshino's extended Borges cycle, the project that has occupied her practice since 1972 when she shifted from oil painting to lithography. As with other works in the series, it likely translates one of Borges's recurring motifs — labyrinths, mirrors, books, the Aleph, gardens of forking paths — into a layered visual field rather than direct illustration. Hoshino's lithographic technique builds tonal density through multiple stones, producing matte, granular surfaces that evoke the texture of weathered manuscript or stone. The Borges-themed sheets typically combine geometric architectures (arcades, staircases, tessellated floors) with passages of looser mark-making, suggesting interior spaces that fold back on themselves. Her work sits apart from the postwar sōsaku-hanga mainstream: she is a Tokyo Geidai-trained oil painter who entered printmaking through Western lithography rather than woodcut, and this cosmopolitan literary orientation, sustained over five decades, distinguishes her output from contemporaries working in more conventionally Japanese subject matter.