Untitled

Provenance:
Private Collection, Toronto

Literature:
Roald Nasgaard, Abstract Painting in Canada, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, 2007, page 115
Notes:
Kazuo Nakamura was a founding member of Toronto’s Painters Eleven, which emerged in 1953. His work evolved from monochromatic abstracted landscapes produced during the Painters Eleven period to abstract works founded on patterns and grids, reflecting inner structures such as magnified views of cellular matter, mathematics or the motions of waves. Science was important to Nakamura – one of the most important influences on his work was Bauhaus teacher László Moholy-Nagy, whose interest in connecting art and science paralleled his own. Nakamura found such things as scientific photographs of subatomic particle tracings fascinating; he stated, “I think there is a sort of fundamental pattern in all art and nature.” Later in the 1950s and during the 1960s, Nakamura’s string, inner structure and block structure paintings manifested his scientific interest in pattern. Like the string paintings, Untitled is monochromatic in hue, predominantly a pale clayish colour underlaid with a greyish green revealed in the outlines. Deliciously textural, this work has a scumbled, malleable look to the ground, and the soft geometric forms repeat in varying sizes. Subtle yet compelling, Untitled is an outstanding example of Nakamura’s unique voice in Canadian modernism.