In Japanese Art, Gihachiro Okuyama was a printmaker and graphic designer, also known as a Sosaku hanga, and a Shin hanga artist. Apart from his production of modern prints, Gihachiro was interested in traditional Japanese prints and produced numerous reproductions of old masters. He also worked on a series of woodblock prints based on European paintings, such as Vincent Van Gogh's widely known 'Sun Flowers'. He was born in Yamagata prefecture in the early 20th Century. During the 1920s, Gihachiro started his career designing commercial posters and advertisements.

By 1930s, he was strongly inspired by the philosophy of Kendo Ishii, a well-known Japanese traditional woodblock print researcher. This encouraged him to produce works based on traditional prints. In 1946, Gihachiro established the Japanese Hanga Institution with other artists in order to re-establish Japanese traditional printing with their great techniques, which gradually lost popularity in Japan. He contributed to make a series of '53 stations of Tokaido', however, the project was not financially successful and the Institution had to be closed down. Despite this failure, the artist constituted with his own prints in the studio in 1954.

Gihachiro Okuyama

3 Items

3 Items

per page