Viva Chicago
About This Series
Viva Chicago is a portfolio of mezzotint engravings by Hamanishi Katsunori (b. 1949), the contemporary Japanese intaglio artist who emerged across the 1980s and 1990s as one of the principal international practitioners of mezzotint, the seventeenth-century European tonal engraving technique that he revived in a distinctively Japanese register of abstracted material surface, gold-leaf embellishment, and meditative tonal field. The series was conceived in connection with Hamanishi's exhibitions, residencies, and gallery relationships in the United States, where the artist had built a substantial collector base through such venues as the International Print Center New York, the Davidson Galleries in Seattle, and the various Chicago-area print dealers who promoted his work in the 1990s and 2000s, the city of Chicago having become an important center for contemporary Japanese print collecting through the holdings of the Art Institute and the activities of the Print Club of Chicago. Each sheet is executed in mezzotint, in which the copperplate is first roughened uniformly with a curved-blade rocker to a velvety burred surface that prints solid black and is then selectively burnished and scraped back to a graduated range of mid-tones and highlights, the resulting image emerging from darkness toward light in the inverse of the line-cut tradition. Hamanishi's subjects in the series sustain his characteristic vocabulary of natural and ritual motif, including chestnut, persimmon, gourd, washi paper texture, knotted rope, and abstract geometric field, treated in the deeply tonal mezzotint manner often augmented with applied gold or silver leaf as in his signature works. Each plate is editioned by the artist in a small numbered edition, and impressions are documented in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Library of Congress, the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Honolulu Museum of Art, and other principal North American holdings of contemporary Japanese print.
Prints in This Series (7)
Frequently Asked Questions
Viva Chicago is a portfolio of mezzotint engravings by Hamanishi Katsunori (b. 1949), the contemporary Japanese intaglio artist who emerged across the 1980s and 1990s as one of the principal international practitioners of mezzotint, the seventeenth-century European tonal engraving technique that he revived in a distinctively Japanese register of abstracted material surface, gold-leaf embellishment, and meditative tonal field. The series was conceived in connection with Hamanishi's exhibitions, residencies, and gallery relationships in the United States, where the artist had built a substantial collector base through such venues as the International Print Center New York, the Davidson Galleries in Seattle, and the various Chicago-area print dealers who promoted his work in the 1990s and 2000s, the city of Chicago having become an important center for contemporary Japanese print collecting through the holdings of the Art Institute and the activities of the Print Club of Chicago. Each sheet is executed in mezzotint, in which the copperplate is first roughened uniformly with a curved-blade rocker to a velvety burred surface that prints solid black and is then selectively burnished and scraped back to a graduated range of mid-tones and highlights, the resulting image emerging from darkness toward light in the inverse of the line-cut tradition. Hamanishi's subjects in the series sustain his characteristic vocabulary of natural and ritual motif, including chestnut, persimmon, gourd, washi paper texture, knotted rope, and abstract geometric field, treated in the deeply tonal mezzotint manner often augmented with applied gold or silver leaf as in his signature works. Each plate is editioned by the artist in a small numbered edition, and impressions are documented in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Library of Congress, the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Honolulu Museum of Art, and other principal North American holdings of contemporary Japanese print.
The Viva Chicago series contains 7 prints, created by Katsunori Hamanishi.
The Viva Chicago series was created by Katsunori Hamanishi (浜西勝則).
We currently have 7 of 7 known prints from the Viva Chicago series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.
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