Dr. Janice Katz, Roger L. Weston Curator of Japanese Art at the Art Institute of Chicago, discusses her new exhibition, Emerging from Darkness: Prints by Hamanishi Katsunori, on view from April 8 to June 22. Over his long and distinguished career, Hamanishi (born 1949) has focused on the production of mezzotint prints. Mezzotints are perhaps the most demanding of all print techniques and are known for their dark and atmospheric appearance. The starting point for a mezzotint is the creation of a roughened surface, which produces a solid black background when printed. To produce the image that emerges from this dark background, Hamanishi uses a series of burnishers and scrapers and the deepest gouges print as white areas on the finished print.
This exhibition celebrates Hamanishi’s gift of his landmark Four Seasons prints to the Art Institute of Chicago. This acquisition is actually only the latest during the long relationship between the artist and the museum, dating back to 1985. In 2013, a large number of works by Hamanishi from the Ninion and Sheldon Landy Collection entered the museum making it the largest collection of the artist’s prints in the world, significant considering the continuing impact that he has on printmaking in Japan and abroad. That gift included the artist’s Viva Chicago series, his personal ode to “the great metropolis located along the banks of Lake Michigan,” which will be shown in full in the exhibition.