Iris No. 167

Iris No. 167 sits late in Sugiura Kazutoshi's iris cycle, a serial project that has become one of the defining bodies of work in postwar Japanese botanical printmaking. The print likely presents a single iris bloom, perhaps paired with a bud, set above the characteristic upright leaves of the species. As kacho-e, the work continues a centuries-old subject category in Japanese woodblock printing while resisting its more decorative tendencies; Sugiura tends to flatten the picture plane and treat the flower as a near-emblematic form. The mokuhanga technique here calls for separately carved blocks for each tonal area, with bokashi gradations along petal edges to register the fall from saturated indigo or violet into a paler heart. The serial numbering aligns Sugiura with international print practices of the same period — limited editions, recurring motifs, slight variation — while the subject ties him to the kacho-e lineage represented in the holdings of the Brooklyn Museum and MoMA.