Image: Portland Art Museum
A yearlong exhibition of Watanabe Sadao’s work includes many of the artist’s best print designs alongside rare original stencils, which are described as beautiful enough to be works of art in themselves. The works will rotate halfway through the exhibition’s run.
Watanabe Sadao (1913–1996) developed a unique stencil-printing process based on traditional Japanese textile-dyeing techniques.
It also traces Watanabe’s distinctive methods and expressive power over several decades while exploring his alignment with the twentieth-century mingei, or folk-art, movement. That movement emphasized the beauty of handmade, everyday objects created from natural materials.
Recent gifts to the collection have made the Portland Art Museum the largest public collection of Watanabe Sadao’s work in the world. Recent research has also revealed that the museum hosted Watanabe’s first solo exhibition at a major American art museum in 1969.
The artist’s listed works include ‘Adam and Eve,’ a 1967 stencil, and ‘A Modern Madonna’ (detail), a 1984 color stencil print on momigami paper identified as katazome-hanga.
