Lyric I

Lyric I is the opening print of Onchi Koshiro's Lyric series, a sequence of abstract compositions central to his identity as Japan's pioneering abstract printmaker. The work introduces the visual logic that recurs across the series: shaped color planes, woodgrain textures used as expressive surface rather than supporting structure, and an open ground in which forms hover without firm spatial anchor. Onchi associated these prints with the non-narrative qualities of music — a parallel he traced to his reading of Kandinsky and to his earlier graphic work for the literary journal Tsukuhae. As a sosaku-hanga artist, he carved every block himself, pulled the impressions by hand with the baren, and treated each pull as a distinct work rather than a copy from an edition. Lyric I therefore functions both as a discrete print and as the conceptual starting point for one of the most coherent bodies of abstract printmaking produced in twentieth-century Japan.