Tomoe Suzuki

Tomoe Suzuki (鈴木 智惠) is a Tokyo-based Japanese lithographer whose mature practice centers on the depiction of women's clothing — handmade garments she designs, sews, and then meticulously draws onto the lithographic stone, translating the textile and the surrounding negative space into the layered tonal language of the lithograph. The combination is distinctive: she is at once dressmaker, draftswoman, and printmaker, with each step of the process feeding back into the printed image.

Suzuki was born in Tokyo and trained at Musashino Art University, where she studied lithography under the senior Tokyo printmaker Kenji Nagai (永井研治). She graduated from the university's Printmaking Course (correspondence-mode programme) in 2011 after eight years of study — a long period that reflects her commitment to working through the lithographic medium thoroughly, from the chemistry of the prepared stone to the registration of multiple plates in colour printing.

Her mid-2010s prizes mark her arrival in the contemporary Japanese print field. In 2014 she received the 3rd FEI Print Award Grand Prize, the 88th Shunyō-kai Art Exhibition Prize, the 59th CWAJ Contemporary Prints Selection Committee Award, and the 82nd Japan Print Association Exhibition Prize. The previous year she won the Excellence Prize at the Awagami International Miniature Exhibition (2013) and the next year she was selected for the 8th Kochi International Triennial Exhibition of Prints (2014). This compact prize sequence — five major prizes in two years — is unusual and indicates a clear consensus among the major Japanese print juries that her practice was a significant new contribution.

Solo exhibitions at Galleria Grafica Bis in Ginza, Tokyo (2014) and at the Hideharu Fukasaku Gallery in Roppongi (2015) consolidated her presence in the Tokyo gallery scene. Her recent prints have continued the women's-clothing motif: the 2025 lithograph 'a moment-25-1' (76 × 58 cm), selected for the 68th CWAJ Print Show, is part of an ongoing series whose individual prints are numbered as moments — small temporal markers in a sustained body of work.

The distinctive feature of Suzuki's practice is the way her dressmaking and her drawing inform each other. Each garment she draws is a real handmade object — designed, cut, sewn — that exists prior to the lithograph. Her artist statement notes that 'her motif is consistently women's clothing, possessing an intense sense of reality distinct from photography': the prints record the texture of fabric, the gathering of cloth, the shadow that a sleeve casts on the body, with a tactile particularity that comes from her direct experience of having made the dress. The lithograph, with its capacity for soft tonal modeling, is the printmaking medium best suited to translate that textile particularity. She continues to live and work in Tokyo, where she is a member of the Japan Print Association.