Iris No 75 — 花菖蒲 No 75

Entry seventy-five in Sugiura Kazutoshi's iris series shows the hana-shōbu in a composition that balances botanical fidelity with the kind of formal abstraction that distinguished his work from more conventionally decorative flower printing. The seventy-fifth iris falls in a cluster of works where Sugiura was exploring variations in the density and placement of the flower within the pictorial field — sometimes isolated at center, sometimes pushed to an edge, sometimes cropped. These compositional experiments gave the series its energy and prevented the obvious repetition that so sustained a project might otherwise risk.