The travelling exhibition �eTime of the Mezzotint�f will be shown at the Musee Hamaguchi Yozo : Yamasa Collection in Tokyo, a private Museum for Yozo Hamaguchi, the master of color mezzotint.
Originating in Latvia in 2012, the project next travelled to Poland and China, and will now be shown in Japan. It is supposed that it will be further in progress at Sweden and others.
The exhibition showcases mezzotints by internationally established artists, with additional color mezzotints by Yozo Hamaguchi.

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SPECIAL PROGRAM On Monday 20 October 2014
* Closed for public, open only for invited or registered persons.

We are pleased to present a special program in the Museum, with a lecture by Dr. Ad Stijnman on the history of color printed mezzotints and a talk show with art historians and participating printmakers. We expect this meeting to be a unique and international event. With this exhibition and its accompanying program we would like more people to know what is Mezzotint and to enjoy the special beauty of prints in this manner.

LECTURE ON COLOR MEZZOTINT from 17:00

Dr. Ad Stijnman : Print historian, participating Mezzotint artist from the Netherlands and advisor to this project in Japan.
Yuriko Miyoshi : Translator, Japanese printmaker based in the Netherlands.

In his presentation he will give a survey of the mezzotint technique, a printmaking process invented in Holland in 1642 that became widely used in the centuries following. The process was (and still is) practiced by Japanese printmakers, starting with Kiyoshi Hasegawa from 1930.
Stijnman will especially focus on the printing in color of mezzotints, a process that was developed in Holland c.1705 - 1710. It was revived for modern printmaking by Yozo Hamaguchi c.1960 and became of great influence to printmakers worldwide.

TALK BY ARTISTS ON �eTIME OF THE MEZZOTINT�f
We will share time for discussion with Dr. Ad Stijnman. Guntars Sietins (participating Mezzotint artist from Latvia and one of the originators of the project) and Anita Vanaga (Art historian from Latvia and Contributor to the catalogue published in Riga, Latvia) take part in this session.

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PROJECT INFOMATION
* This text is based on the press release for the exhibition in Latvia 2012.

     Due to its velvety nature and time consuming process the mezzotint is regarded an elitist print technique. Born in the middle of seventeenth century as a unique kind of tonal expression at the time, mezzotint experienced its boom or the so called Golden Age a century later.
     An interest in mezzotint for contemporary printmaking revived at the late twentieth century. The influence of the outstanding artists Maurits Cornelis Escher (1898-1972) and Yozo Hamaguchi (1909-2000) upon their followers should be noted, as well as the wave of particular popularity of mezzotint during the seventies of the last century, bound to the swollen interest in photorealism which this graphic technique was especially suitable.
     Today the term �emezzotint�f has surpassed the boundaries of terminology used within the professional art environment. Maybe not every computer user among the millions of users in the contemporary world will know the mezzotint masterpieces created in the eighteenth century, but many of them will surely have heard at least about the filter mezzotint offered by the image processing software Adobe Photoshop.
     Advancement of contemporary digital technologies in some respect has rekindled the interest of artists in classic techniques of printmaking, and mezzotint among them.
     However today there aren�ft many artists in the world who consequently work using mezzotint as their technique. A vital factor more than once precluding from applying this technique is time. Time required to create even a small format work sometimes can be several times bigger than that used to perform a work in some other technique. For this reason the idea to cooperate and to organise international joint exhibitions following the initiative from the artists themselves was conceived.

     The originators of the project are Christopher Nowicki, an American artist and professor of the Graphic arts department at the Art Academy of Wroclaw, and Guntars Sietins, Head of the Graphic Art Department at the Art Academy of Latvia. The participants of the project are artists (birth, origin / residence): Fan Min (1963-, China), Katsunori Hamanishi (1949-, Japan), Jaroslaw Jedrzejowski (1975-. Poland), Masataka Kuroyanagi (1961-, Japan), Christopher Nowicki (1950-, America / Poland), Juris Petraskevics (1953-, Latvia), Antti Ratalahti (1964-, Finland), Guntars Sietins (1962-, Latvia), Ad Stijnman (1957-, The Netherlands), Jukka Vanttinen (1954-, Finland / Sweden), Majla Zeneli (1980-, Albania / Germany), Vija Celmins (1938-, Latvia / America), Yozo Hamaguchi (1909-2000, Japan / France / America).
     The majority of the works are exhibited in Japan for the first time. Each author presents 3-4 art pieces. Specially one print by Vija Celmins added to the exhibition in Tokyo.