Kazuo Nakamura
(1926–)
(–2002)
Kazuo Nakamura
1926–2002
Kazuo Nakamura (1926–2002) was a Japanese-Canadian painter and sculptor born in Vancouver, British Columbia. He was a founding member of the Painters Eleven and a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. Nakamura produced abstract paintings that were distinct among Canadian artists of his generation.
At the age of fifteen, Nakamura was subject to the Japanese-Canadian internment camps during World War II, a subject he frequently depicted in his early paintings and watercolours. After the war, his family settled in Toronto where he attended the Central Technical School from 1948 to 1951. Nakamura became a member of the Painters Eleven shortly after.
Nakamura was part of the first exhibition by Painters Eleven in February of 1954 at Toronto’s Roberts Gallery. From 1953 to 1956, he exhibited in six other Painters Eleven shows, as well as in numerous exhibitions at the Ontario Society of Fine Arts. In 1955, he was included in the First Biennial Exhibition of Canadian Painting at the National Gallery of Canada, and in 1956 participated in the Fourth International Exhibition of Drawings and Prints in Lugano, Switzerland. In the late 1950s, he participated in numerous international exhibitions from New York to Holland, Switzerland, Germany, and Yugoslavia.
From the 1950s to 1960s, his paintings were categorized into four distinct types: dark, vaguely surreal block structures in stark environments evoking the prairies; muted landscapes with a gentle broken touch; off-white abstractions painted over spare, linear configurations of string laid down on canvas; and linear abstractions in an indeterminate space. In the 1960s, he worked on a series of sculptural towers similar to inukshuks, which he called Tower Structures. In the early 1970s, his work took a dramatic turn –he abandoned his previous styles for the next 25 years and produced a body of work entitled the Number Structures, which contain grids, tables, and triangles that connected mathematics and art.
His interest in the relation between mathematical perfection and visual medium led him to investigate the connection between form and dimension.
All of his paintings had simple structures and coloration (mostly monochrome) more so than the work of other members of Painters Eleven. Nakamura credited Painters Eleven artists, Jock MacDonald, and László Moholy-Nagy as his spiritual teachers and lifetime influences. Nakamura was keenly interested in science, which revealed the structures inherent in nature, and felt that there was a fundamental universal pattern in both art and nature. His treatment of landscape encompassed both the natural world and abstraction and the delicate fracturing of the image was both subtle and harmonious.
In 2001, Nakamura’s retrospective exhibition was presented by the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa. The show travelled to Charlottetown, Kingston, Hamilton, and Saskatoon. After Nakamura died in 2002, the Art Gallery of Ontario organized a retrospective of his work in 2004 entitled “A Human Measure.”