Marilyn

Marilyn brings the Marilyn Monroe icon — already filtered through Warhol's silkscreen treatment — into the mokuhanga tradition, an explicitly cross-cultural and cross-medium gesture characteristic of Kristensen's contemporary sensibility. The subject lends itself to the flat color planes and bold outline that registered woodblock printing produces: a portrait built from a key block holding the linework and successive color blocks laying down hair, skin and lips as discrete tonal areas, hand-pulled with baren on washi. Where Warhol's Marilyns relied on the slippage of misregistered screens for their effect, mokuhanga's much tighter registration with kentō notches yields a quieter, more deliberate image, with bokashi gradations possible across cheek or background. The print belongs to Kristensen's wider strategy of taking material that sits firmly within Western pop iconography and rendering it through Japanese craft tradition — a reverse direction from his Tokyo Tower series, which instead took Western or contemporary subject matter (the tower itself a French-influenced structure) and inserted it into a classical Japanese compositional framework.