Oviri

The influential Post-Impressionist Paul Gauguin French, 1848-1903 created the wood-block print Oviri in 1894. This highly expressionistic piece exemplifies the artist's intense focus on symbolic representation and his search for primal authenticity during his second period in Tahiti. The print’s creation relies on the reductive medium of the woodcut, utilizing black ink pressed onto a delicate cream wove Japanese paper, which was subsequently laid down onto a secondary sheet of cream wove paper for structural support. Gauguin’s choice of this demanding technique allowed him to achieve stark, immediate, and expressive contrasts that differentiate his graphic output from his painted canvases, contributing significantly to the modernization of printmaking in France.

The subject matter, Oviri, translates from Tahitian roughly to ‘Savage’ or ‘Wild Woman,’ depicting a mythological figure combining themes of creation, fertility, and death. Gauguin originally conceived of the figure as a large ceramic sculpture, but adapted the menacing and enigmatic form for his graphic works. The composition captures the raw, primal energy that the artist idealized in Polynesian spirituality, often contrasting it implicitly with the perceived materialism of contemporary Europe. The heavy black lines and simplified, stylized planes reinforce the Symbolist aesthetic that dominated Gauguin’s work after 1890. As a key example of the artist's late output, the image remains widely reproduced today, with many high-quality prints and related sculptural works entering the public domain. This important impression of Oviri is held in the prestigious collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.