Flowers and Women (Hana to onna)
花と女
- Date:
- 1979
- Medium:
- Linen portfolio of five woodblock prints on paper; each sheet 51.0 × 35.0 cm; mica and gofun on selected sheets; numbered 192/250
- Source:
- Saru Gallery
花と女
The 1979 Hana to onna (Flowers and Women) portfolio is a linen-bound set of five woodblock prints that translates Furusawa Iwami's mature surrealist female imagery into the colour-block woodblock medium. Each sheet measures approximately 51 by 35 centimetres, and the portfolio was published in an edition of 250 (this impression numbered 192/250) with a four-page Japanese leaflet supplying individual titles and contextual notes. The five prints share the broad iconographic framework of Furusawa's painted and intaglio female figures, in which the bodies of women are presented as the surrealist landscape on which dream-imagery and memory-imagery alike are inscribed; but where the etchings interrogate this material with a draughtsman's bitten line and the lithographs with atmospheric tone, the woodblock medium allows Furusawa to set the figures within fields of flat, lacquer-bright colour interrupted by selected passages of mica (kira) and powdered shell white (gofun) that catch and scatter incident light. Each sheet is accompanied by its own transparent overlay, a Japanese portfolio-binding convention that protects the printed surface during handling. The portfolio cover bears Furusawa's signature printed in gold and an impressed nude figure, integrating the binding object into the overall surrealist surface. As a representative example of Furusawa's mature woodblock practice within the broader context of his three-medium graphic corpus, the Hana to onna portfolio documents the way his post-war surrealism could be translated into the polychrome-print tradition while preserving the figural and imaginative concerns that organized his etching and lithography of the same period.
Curated cross-cuts that include this print.
Flowers and Women (Hana to onna) (花と女) was created by Iwami Furusawa (古沢岩美) in 1979.
Flowers and Women (Hana to onna) depicts birds & flowers.
