Permanent Collections: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Library of Congress, Washington; University of Alberta, Edmonton; The British Museum, London; Krakow National Museum; Osaka National Museum of Art; Achenbach Foundation, San Francisco; Taipei Fine Arts Museum; Art Gallery of New South Wales. Among numerous exhibitons, in 2004 he held a major exhibition at the Worcester Art Museum with Hamaguchi Yozo, the mezzotint master.
Hamanishi is one of a group of Japanese artists who have explored the rich, dark, three-dimensional effects achievable with the old European mezzotint techniques. It is probably the most demanding of all printing methods, and Hamanishi has reached exceptional technical proficiency in this medium. His early subjects-twigs, branches, rice stalks, rope- are presented in a three-dimensional form on paper. These are not produced from photographs, but each image has been painstakingly burnished on the plate. More recently he has began to introduce colour into his works of Japanese architecture and landscapes, adding metal plates or gold or silver leaf to his stunningly beautiful compositions.
