Space&Space Nature 99H

Nature 99H is part of the 1999-dated subgroup of Space&Space prints, identified by the year-and-letter coding Endo applied to many works produced in that period. The 99-series prints typically pair a photographically derived natural motif — most frequently trees, foliage or water — with a sharply edged geometric block of solid colour, the two halves meeting along a precise straight edge that becomes the implicit subject of the work. Endo's process layers offset photo-plates with woodblock impressions on washi, so the photographic passages retain fine tonal gradation while the flat colour fields read as opaque, baren-pressed planes. The juxtaposition is intended less as collage than as confrontation: a fragment of organic specificity placed beside an absolute, quasi-architectural void. Within the artist's broader practice — which moved from lithographs of pencils and eggs in 1979 toward digitally composed imagery in the 1980s — Nature 99H represents the mature phase of the Space&Space project, when the formal vocabulary of figure, ground, and the seam between them had been thoroughly distilled.