Warriors in Combat

Warriors in Combat, printed in 1970 as a stencil in an edition of thirty-five, presents armored samurai in the dynamic confusion of battle — a subject that required Mori to organize the energy of physical conflict into a readable and aesthetically resolved composition. The combat scene's multiple overlapping figures, each in a different posture of attack or defense, created a compositional challenge that his sosaku-hanga training equipped him to meet. The stencil technique, with its bold areas of solid color and clean outlines, gave the scene a graphic clarity that helped the viewer read the individual figures within the tangle of combat.