/guid/9202a8c04000641f8000000004848f61 rename

Kazuo Nakamura was a Japanese-Canadian painter and sculptor (born Vancouver October 13, 1926; died...

Kazuo Nakamura was a Japanese-Canadian painter and sculptor (born Vancouver October 13, 1926; died Toronto April 9, 2002) and a founding member of the Toronto-based Painters Eleven group in the 1950s. Kazuo Nakamura was born in Vancouver, British Columbia and was among the Japanese-Canadians interned during World War II. He studied at Toronto's Central Technical School (1948-51), and co-founded 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. 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 sructure" paintings from the 1950s. In the 1970s and 80s he increasingly emphasized his grid paintings based on number structures, which came to involve the Pascal triangle. To Nakamura, these laboriously inscribed works were a quest for some ultimate order in the apparent chaos of the universe. His work is part of the