Mikio Watanabe

Mikio Watanabe (born 1954, Yokohama) is a Japanese-French printmaker who has worked in mezzotint almost exclusively for more than four decades, making him one of the most consistent practitioners of the technique in contemporary European printmaking. His work is characterised by saturated, velvety blacks scraped from rocked copper plates, against which the female nude — most often his wife and lifelong model Yuriko — emerges in soft, classical light. Since the early 2000s he has gradually extended this vocabulary to natural subjects: birds, butterflies, frogs, plants, and shoreline imagery, often printed in muted single colour or with chine collé.

Watanabe trained as a printmaker at the École des Beaux-Arts in Tokyo, graduating in 1977. That same year he left Japan overland, travelling via the Trans-Siberian Railway to Paris, where he began the formative period of his career. From 1979 to 1981 he studied intaglio printmaking at Atelier 17, the Paris workshop founded by Stanley William Hayter that had been the most influential studio for postwar etching and engraving experimentation in Europe. Working alongside Hayter and the workshop's international community gave him exposure to the full range of intaglio techniques, but by the early 1980s he had committed his practice to mezzotint — a form rare in twentieth-century printmaking because of the labour required to rock a copper plate to a uniform black tooth before scraping back the image. He mastered the process in 1983 and has worked in it almost exclusively since.

Settled in France, Watanabe has spent more than three decades dividing his time between a home and studio in Pierric, Brittany, where he raised his family, and a Paris studio that he has operated since 2001. His mezzotints are typically printed in editions of around ninety, signed, titled, and dated by hand in pencil, with edition numbers recorded in arabic numerals — although his earlier 1990s editions used Roman numerals. He has produced more than ninety distinct mezzotint plates, with image areas ranging from miniature (under 10 cm) to medium-sized works approaching 30 cm.

His early black-only nudes give way, in the 2000s and 2010s, to mezzotints printed with single tones of indigo, sepia, deep red, or pale ochre, and to compositions in which botanical and animal subjects share the plate with the figure. Recurring titles include Sommeil, Partition, Le Vent, Memoire, Memoire d'Eau (a series), Nu Assis, Secret, Sérénité, Chevelure, Hanche, Rêverie, Suite, Voeux, Deux Torses, Carpe Diem, Vol de Nuit, Voltige, Tromb, Croissant, Une Sieste, Eblouissante, Arche, La Guerre ou la Paix, Mon histoire son histoire, and Passage agité.

Watanabe's awards date from the late 1980s onward and reflect a sustained presence in European print biennials. He won prizes at the Salon de la Gravure Originale in Bayeux, France (1989), and the Miniprint Internacional in Cadaqués, Spain (1992). The Foundation Taylor in Paris awarded him the Kiyoshi Hasegawa Prize in 2007 and the Marie et Léon Navier Prize in 2013. He took second prize at the 29th World Print Triennial in Chamalières, France (2014), and First Prize in Classical Printmaking at Miniprint Kazanlak, Bulgaria (2018).