Kazuo Nakamura

Kazuo Nakamura was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, as a second-generation Japanese Canadian (nisei). He began his art training in 1940 at the Vancouver Technical Secondary School. Jock Macdonald, who was teaching there, is believed to have taught Nakamura design and also tutored him in drawing and painting.[4] Nakamura was a teenager when he became one of the 22,000 Japanese Canadians interned during World War II. At the internment camp in Tashme, near Hope, British Columbia, Nakamura continued to create artworks, such as the painting Tashme at Dusk, July/August 1944 (1944). Although he was able to paint only at day’s end, art provided an essential escape.[5] Forbidden by the Canadian government from returning home to British Columbia after the war, Nakamura lived in Hamilton, Ontario, briefly before settling in Toronto in August 1947.[6] He studied at Toronto's Central Technical School (1948–51), and was a founding member of Painters Eleven. Although sharing in the other members' use of painterly abstraction, Nakamura's work was distinguished within the group by his use of simpler structures and monochromatic colours. While he is largely known as a member of Painters Eleven, Nakamura achieved tremendous success outside of the group and was internationally recognized by the late 1950s.[7]

Inner Structure, 1956, oil on masonite

Influenced by fellow Painters Eleven member Jock Macdonald's interest in László Moholy-Nagy's reading of science, Nakamura was concerned with science, time and space. Nakamura described himself as seeking a "fundamental universal pattern in all art and nature" reflected in his "inner structure" paintings from the 1950s.[8] In the 1970s and 1980s he increasingly emphasized his grid paintings based on number structures, which came to involve the Fibonacci number system. To Nakamura, these laboriously inscribed works were a quest for some ultimate order in the apparent chaos of the universe. He regarded the Number Structure series as his most important body of work, although his blue/green landscapes, which he began producing in the 1960s, are his most popular and recognizable paintings.[9]

His work is part of the permanent collection at Toronto's Lester Pearson International Airport and Ontario Provincial Queen's Park Complex.

In 1983 and 1984 as part of Ontario Heritage Foundation's Firestone Collection Nakamura's work toured London (UK), Paris and Madrid. In 1991 he exhibited at the New Canadian Embassy in Tokyo and in 1992 at Ader Tajan, Art Contemporain du Canada, Espace Chapon in Paris.

In 2000 Nakamura was made an honorary fellow at the OCAD University[10] and in 2004 he was the subject of the posthumous retrospective Kazuo Nakamura: A Human Measure at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto.[11] He was made a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.[12]

• Brandon, Laura. War Art in Canada: A Critical History. Toronto: Art Canada Institute, 2021. ISBN 978-1-4871-0271-5
• Hatch, John G. Kazuo Nakamura: Life & Work. Toronto: Art Canada Institute, 2021. ISBN 978-1-4871-0258-6
• Hill, Richard William, John Mighton, Kazuo Nakamura and Kerri Sakamoto. Kazuo Nakamura: A Human Measure. Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 2004. ISBN 1-894243-42-0
• Holubizky, Ihor and Kazuo Nakamura. Kazuo Nakamura: The Method of Nature. Oshawa, Ontario: Robert McLaughlin Gallery, 2001. ISBN 0-921500-50-5
• Nowell, Iris (2011). P11, Painters Eleven: The Wild Ones of Canadian Art. Douglas & McIntyre. ISBN 9781553655909.
• Nasgaard, Roald (2008). Abstract Painting in Canada. Douglas & McIntyre. pp. 115–118. ISBN 9781553653943. Retrieved 2020-08-20.

• Artist's page at Christopher Cutts Gallery in Toronto
• Basic information and images
• Gallery of Nakamura's work
• Work "Two Horizons" (1968) at Queen's Park in Toronto