<b>NIGHT FOREST</b> / Tetsuro Komai1958<b>SOLD</b></em>

Details

Komai Testuro is celebrated as a pioneer of modern copperplate printmaking in Japan. He studied under Onchi Koshiro, where he learned the spirit of experimentation and utilized unconventional materials and techniques, such as printing with sand, to create novel and innovative printing effects. His designs are charged with mystery, poetry, and movement. Many of his most notable works seem to reveal a hidden universe that lay beyond the ordinary confines of the perceivable world.

Night Forest is one of Komai’s most celebrated works. The design features a diversity of forms rendered in tonalities of gray. The print is both dark and luminous as if one might imagine walking through a dense forest at midnight observing stars and moonlight as the light filters through a multitude of surfaces such as leaves, wet with the dew of the coming dawn. The design is spellbinding, foreboding, and yet enticing.

Connoisseur's Note

Komai’s works are executed in small editions as well as various artist’s proofs. It is in these artist’s proofs, or EPs, where Komai’s spirit of experimentation is best demonstrated. In this impression, for example, there are areas where the artist varied the application of ink and pressure causing subtle applications of pigment on the surface of the paper, which yielded a more pronounced luminous effect than the regular run of 20. There is also a variant state of this design executed in tonalities of blue done in a run of 20.