Espace No 41

The French title "Espace," meaning space, connects this 1964 print to the international art vocabulary that Masaji engaged with during the 1960s, when Japanese abstract artists participated actively in exhibitions across Europe and the Americas. The number 41 indicates a sustained series exploring spatial concepts through the woodblock medium. By 1964, Masaji had been working abstractly for over a decade, and his spatial investigations had grown increasingly refined, stripping away surface incident to concentrate on the fundamental interaction between form and void. The print medium, listed simply as "Print," was produced during a period when Masaji was pushing the technical boundaries of woodblock to compete visually with lithography and silkscreen, the dominant printmaking techniques in Western abstract art.