Manami Ito

Manami Ito (伊藤 学美, born 1987 in Tottori Prefecture) is a Japanese printmaker 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 period at Aalto University in Helsinki in 2011 — and completed her M.F.A. in the printmaking area at KCUA in 2013. She is an Assistant Professor (助教) in the Faculty of Arts at Hiroshima City University.

Ito built a strong competition record early in her career. She received the Clifford Chance Prize at the International Print Biennale 2016 in Newcastle (UK) and the Grand Prize in the classical category of the AOMORI Triennale 2017, and she took prizes at a series of Japanese print exhibitions in the mid-2010s, including the Kyoto Exhibition (Kyoten) and the Kochi International Print Triennial. The 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 as introducing ambiguity and coincidence 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 Transcending Photography at Clifford Chance LLP, London (2017), which followed her 2016 Newcastle prize; surface at Gallery Noivoi, Aichi (2019); garden at NEUTRAL, Kyoto (2022); and surface echo at Art Zone Kaguraoka, Kyoto (2022). She has undertaken artist residencies including at Kanazawa Yuwaku Sosaku no Mori and the Shiga Ceramic Cultural Park. Her work is held in the collections of the Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts, Aalto University, Kyoto City University of Arts, the Ueda City Museum of Art, and Clifford Chance LLP.

Within contemporary Japanese intaglio, Ito occupies a distinctive position as one of the few drypoint specialists working at this level — much 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.