Born in Hokkaido, Katsunori Hamanishi studied painting and graduated from Tokai University with a degree in art in 1973. He then studied at the university of Pennsylvania on a grant from the Cultural Affairs Agency between 1987 and 1988.
Hamanishi has won numerous prizes, including the Ibiza International Print Biennial (1978), the Grechen International Triennial in Sjwitzerland (1982) and the Valparaiso International Exhibition in Chile (1989). Exhibitions have been held in Paris, Belgium, Philadelphia, Tokyo,Kyoto, Cairo and San Francisco and he has been selected to design the cover for the prestigious CWAJ Annual print show in Japan on two occasions.
Hamanishi's field of expertise is Mezzotint although he has done woodblock , lithography and sculpture. He is considered to be one of the finest mezzotint artists in the world today. Papyrus Gallery is fortunate to be his first Australian representative.
He states that the huge range of creative possibilities that the burr thrown up by the mezzotint rocker creates is the enticing factor that keeps him producing work at such velocity and of such stunning quality.
Mezzotint is a member of the intaglio printmaking family (see notes for more detail) . It is an extremely time consuming process but produces beautifully realised images that take shape from an inky blackness through various tones of grey into the light.
The subtlety of tone in some of his work is barely discernable especially in some of his 'Silence' works. But these subtleties go into creating carefully modulated and intriguing works. As he said, time and patience is an integral part of the mezzotint process hence it affects the tone of the work produced.Technical dexterity and playfulness is an aspect that continues to expand in his works. For example many of his works use different forms of print making on the one print.
In some works he uses relief printing over the top of the mezzotint - for example in 'Window No.18' he has used a shiny black ink as a relief print in the upper right corner and in the lower right corner.
In 'Window 19 " he has used metallic ink in relief and he has used gold leaf in most of the prints shown in the gallery. In other works he has used silver and other foils as well as powdered micas. In this regard you could say he has used mixed media to add to the diversity of his style and expand the range of his expression.
Hamanishi has been amazingly productive in his relatively short stellar career. His range of subject matter has gone from a fascination with realising 3D form in space, wrapping solid objects in soft gauze, making them buckle under some unseen pressure ('object series'), wrapping branches with twine, simple juxtapositions of rope and branches against subtle backgrounds.
From here he moves into an exploration of the abstract elements of composition, colour, texture, space and line ('division series').Then his 'ears of rice series' where he juxtaposes detailed studies of the natural world with sometimes more abstract forms. And more recently his 'window series', an incredibly elegant and sometimes mysterious view of Japans' cultural legacies. Here he has returned to his cultural roots for inspiration but artistically he says he loves the reductive works of Piet Mondrian -the circle, the square, the triangle. He uses these elements to unify some of his works - in others he reveals the Japanese reverence for the beauty of the calligraphic line.
PERMANENT COLLECTIONS
Hamanishi's mezzotints are in the permanent collections of the
• New York Metropolitan Museum of Art
• New York Museum of Modern Art (MOMA),
• Art Institute of Chicago,
• Library of congress,
• Taipei Fine Art Museum,
• Krakow National Museum,
• Osaka National Museum of Art and the
• Achenback Foundation for Graphic arts in San Francisco.