BLUE CROSS BY HISASHI MOMOSE
Born in Hokkaido, Japan, in 1944, printmaker Hisashi Momose exhibited with Edinburgh Printmakers and the National Museum of Scotland (then the Royal Scottish Museum) in 1999, following a cultural exchange the year before between Scotland and the northerly prefecture Iwate, tiled Iwate Art Festival UK98. After studying at the Hokkaido University of Education, Asahikawa, and Iwate University, Momose gained renown as an internationally established painter and printmaker, with an emphasis on inventive use of colour.
Blue Cross, the work on show as part of the Workshop exhibition, is a lithograph, although the artist primarily works in silkscreen and NECO print technology. He first became interested in working with screenprinting in 1969, later experimenting with new approaches, producing reversible prints through utilizing innovative scanning techniques and print processes. Since the 1980s, Momose has worked with Japanese washi paper, using both the front and reverse to highlight delicacy and translucency in his work. As the artist’s practice has progressed, he has continued to bring additional materials into his practice: traditional “haku” gold and silver leaves, complex gluing and collage techniques and natural pigments, reinforcing the flatness of his compositions and presenting delicate colour gradations.
In recent years, Momose began to create site-specific installations with multiple layers of nets painted in fluorescent colors, with a public work at the Tokyo Midtown complex in 2007 attracting wide-ranging attention. The artist most recently showed in Scotland in 2011, at the Sculpture Court at Edinburgh College of Art, as part of a fundraising effort for recovery in the Tohoku region following the tsunami. Momose’s works are held a major public collections in Japan and abroad, including the Kanagawa Prefectural Museum of Modern Art, and the National Galleries of Scotland.