Sacred Mountains 8

The eighth print in Hiroshima's Sacred Mountains series, executed nine years after the previous entry and in the same year as Sacred Mountains 9, suggesting the two were conceived as a pair or as part of a renewed campaign on the theme. Mezzotint allows the artist to build the image from black down through every gradation of grey to bare paper, a process well suited to the heavy stillness of a mountain at dawn or dusk. By 2024 Hiroshima had been rocking and burnishing copper plates for several decades, both for his own work and as the printer of editioned mezzotints for other artists. Sacred mountains (reizan) function in Japanese religious geography as dwelling places of kami and as sites of mountain asceticism; the series engages this pictorial tradition without recourse to the bright register of nishiki-e landscape, instead working entirely within the tonal range of the rocked plate.