Kazuo Nakamura

Suspension 5, 1968

24X22" oil on canvas

This image courtesy of James Rottman Fine Art.

Spatial Concept, 1968

37.01X31.1" oil on canvas

Ages Past, 1953

27X38" oil on masonite

Kazuo Nakamura was a pioneering Canadian abstract painter of the 1950's who died in 2002. He was a founding member of the Painters Eleven, who banded together to collectively exhibit their work to the city of Toronto, which was apparently shocked and dismayed by their abstract zeal. But Nakamura didn't work with the expressive fury of his community at the time. Instead of dealing in automatism or action/reaction, Nakamura experimented with few colors and refined lines. As I read here, "a re-evaluation of Kazuo Nakamura's art in terms of his interest in science and mathematics reveals the core of his creative inspiration: the inevitable tension between the ideal of objective observation and the specificities of culture, politics and the limitations of human understanding." The introspective-mathematician/artist-plumbing-flat-surfaces-for-the-divine is my favorite kinda abstract painter, and Kazuo Nakamura was an important one (even though word doesn't get out of Canada so much sometimes).

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