Manami Ito

Manami Ito (伊藤 学美) is a Japanese printmaker born in Tottori Prefecture who has built her practice around drypoint copperplate printmaking, using thousands of layered fine drypoint lines to render landscapes of pines, water surfaces, and Japanese gardens. She earned her B.F.A. in Printmaking from Kyoto City University of Arts (KCUA) in 2011 — including an exchange semester at Aalto University School of Arts in Helsinki in 2011 — and her M.F.A. in Printmaking at KCUA in 2013. As of 2024 she has been appointed Assistant Professor (助教) at the Faculty of Arts of Hiroshima City University, where she teaches printmaking.

Ito's competition record from her early career is exceptional. The KYO-TEN13 Mayor's Award (Kyoto Prefectural Center for Arts and Culture, 2013), the Annual Exhibition Kyoto City University of Arts Mayor's Award, the GEIBUN-KYO-TEN 2016 First Award, the International Print Biennale 2016 in Newcastle (UK) — Clifford Chance Purchase Prize, and the AOMORI Triennale 2017 (classical category, First Award) all came within four years of her graduation. The international Newcastle award and the Aomori first prize together established her as one of the leading younger Japanese intaglio voices.

Her practice consists almost exclusively of drypoint on copper plate, printed in restrained black or grey ink on Japanese paper. The drypoint burr — the soft raised metal ridge produced when a needle is dragged across the plate — gives her lines a characteristic blurred, organic quality that she has described in her artist statement as introducing "ambiguity and coincidences" into otherwise meticulously composed images. Her subject matter — pines, gardens, water surfaces — is consistent across more than a decade of work, treated as opportunities to investigate the texture of accumulated drypoint linework rather than as conventional landscape representation.

Solo exhibitions include surface (Gallery Noivoi, Aichi, 2019), IN WHITE (Gallery KEI-FU, Kyoto, 2019), Brackish Water (21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, 2023), Drifting and Tide (Gallery Noivoi, Aichi, 2024), and floating (Hiroshima City University Art Museum, 2024). The 2024 floating exhibition at Hiroshima CU coincided with her appointment to the faculty there. In 2025 she presented Mirrors and Odor at Maruju Art Hangar (Tottori) and echoes errors at Gallery KEI-FU (Kyoto). Earlier solo work includes Transcending Photography at Clifford Chance LLP (London, 2017), the consequence of her 2016 Newcastle Purchase Prize, and empty at Kyoto Art Zone Kaguraoka (2017).

She was awarded artist residencies at Kanazawa Yuwaku Sōsaku no Mori (2018) and the Aomori Contemporary Art Centre (2018), the latter following her AOMORI Triennale prize. Her work is held in the Kanazawa Yuwaku Creative Forest collection, the Aomori Contemporary Art Centre collection, and private collections through Clifford Chance LLP and the Hiroshima CU Art Museum.

Within contemporary Japanese intaglio Ito occupies a distinctive position as one of the few drypoint specialists working at this level — most of her cohort has shifted toward etching, aquatint, or photogravure for tonal effects, while Ito remains committed to the slow accretion of drypoint line as the primary technical means. Her appointment to Hiroshima City University in 2024 places her in the regional Chūgoku-area print-teaching network alongside the Hiroshima City University Faculty of Arts Toshimitsu Ito (an unrelated artist).