Memories

Furusawa Iwami's Memories is a large-format late lithograph that places his characteristic surrealist female figuration into the chromatic and atmospheric language of post-war Japanese stone-printing. The paper, measuring approximately 65 by 50.5 centimetres, represents a generous sheet size for an editioned colour lithograph and provides the latitude that Furusawa needed for the layered, dreamlike imagery he had developed across five decades of post-war practice. Numbered 86 from an edition of 125, the print belongs to the lyrical, female-centred strand of his graphic work that runs in parallel with the more harrowing intaglio cycles based on his wartime experience: where the Shuragaki etchings present the asura and hungry-ghost realms of Buddhist cosmology as a metaphor for industrialized warfare, the Memories lithograph belongs to the contemplative register in which the artist returned to female figure subjects and to the imagery of recollection and loss. The Saru Gallery impression preserves fine condition and colours with only a single fold disturbing the lower-left corner, conditions that suggest careful storage since the date of issue. As a representative example of Furusawa's lithography in the larger context of his three-medium print practice — alongside the woodblock portfolios and the etching cycles — it provides direct access to a graphic mode in which the painter's surrealist vocabulary registers as colour and atmosphere rather than as carved or bitten line.