Poster For contemporary exhibition

This print functions as exhibition ephemera, a promotional sheet produced for a contemporary art exhibition in the sosaku-hanga circle. Maekawa, like many of his peers in the creative print movement, designed posters and announcement cards as extensions of his studio practice, treating them as legitimate works rather than mere advertising. The composition typically combines bold lettering with a figurative motif, printed in the artist-cut, artist-printed manner that defined sosaku-hanga ideology. Areas of flat, uninked grain show the texture of the cherry block beneath thin films of pigment, and registration is often deliberately loose to emphasize the handmade quality. Maekawa's involvement in such projects reflects the close-knit network around the Nihon Hanga Kyokai (Japan Print Association), which he helped found in 1931. Posters of this kind document the institutional self-consciousness of the movement, which sought to distinguish hand-printed mokuhanga from the commercial shin-hanga prints of contemporaries like Yoshida and Hasui. The print survives as both a graphic statement and a record of Maekawa's role as organizer and advocate within twentieth-century Japanese printmaking.