Nakamura, Kazuo

▪ 2003

      Canadian artist (b. Oct. 13, 1926, Vancouver, B.C.—d. April 9, 2002, Toronto, Ont.), was a prominent member of Painters Eleven, a group of Toronto-based avant-garde artists who championed abstract art in the 1950s and '60s; Nakamura was highly regarded for geometric paintings that were among the most distinctive abstract works in 20th-century Canadian art. During World War II Nakamura, a second-generation Japanese in Canada, was interned at a camp near Hope, B.C. The camp and its surroundings became the subject of some of his earliest paintings. After the war Nakamura settled with his family in Ontario. From 1948 to 1951 he studied art at Central Technical School, Toronto. He accepted an invitation by artist William Ronald to join Painters Eleven, with whom he was associated from 1953 to 1960. He exhibited with the group but also held a number of notable one-man exhibitions, including those at the Gallery of Contemporary Art, Toronto, in 1956 and 1958, at the Morris International Gallery, Toronto, in 1962 and 1965, and at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa, Ont., in 1974 and 1975. Nakamura's paintings tended to be simpler in structure and more quietly introspective than those of his Painters Eleven colleagues. One work, Infinite Waves (1957), consisted only of white oil paint over parallel strings glued to a canvas. In later years Nakamura became interested in a field of mathematics known as number structure and, abandoning painting altogether, produced abstract works that often featured rows of numbers on large sheets of white paper. In 2001–02 a selection of Nakamura's works was on touring exhibition in Canada.

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