Poster

Titled simply "Poster", the print foregrounds the graphic poster aesthetic that underlay much of Inagaki's mature work. Sosaku-hanga of the 1930s onward absorbed the lessons of European modernist poster design — flat color planes, heavy contour, decorative typography — and Inagaki was one of the printmakers who carried that vocabulary furthest within mokuhanga. A work bearing this title is likely to reproduce or invent a poster image as its subject, translating commercial graphic conventions into the registered carved-block process: each color a separate cherry block, each impression pulled by hand on washi, the kento marks holding the layers in alignment. The result is a poster that retains the eye-level immediacy of the printed advertisement while declaring its handmade origins — the soft absorbent paper, the slight bleed at color edges, the artist's seal — at odds with industrial lithography. The print situates Inagaki within the cross-current between fine-art mokuhanga and modern Japanese graphic design.