Unknown, abstract face

This print represents Sekino's engagement with portraiture pushed toward formal abstraction. Throughout his career he developed a mode of facial representation that simplified features into bold, sometimes distorted planar forms while retaining psychological presence. The face is reduced to its essential volumes—brow ridge, cheekplane, jaw—segmented by strong carved contour lines into interlocking color zones that read simultaneously as representation and pattern. This approach drew partly on German Expressionist print traditions he encountered through study and partly on the indigenous Japanese tradition of mask carving, in which noh and bugaku masks had long practiced the controlled abstraction of the human face. The limited palette probable here—perhaps two or three flat tones plus black—would achieve maximum impact through contrast rather than tonal gradation, making the abstract face immediately legible as a face while denying realistic depth.