Work － L.ℓ.R.Ⅰ

Born in Tokyo in 1935, Natsuyuki Nakanishi was a contemporary artist leading the post-World War II Japanese art scene. Nakanishi graduated from Tokyo University of the Arts in 1958. He received wide attention for his anti-art performance at Hi Red Center he founded with Genpei Akasegawa and Jiro Takamatsu in 1963. Nakanishi also collaborated with several artists, including dancer Tatsumi Hijikata and Tatsuhiko Shibusawa, by providing theatrical designs for dramas they were dealing with. From the late 1960s, he started to focus on producing paintings, and after the Hopscotch at the Summit series, he began creating paintings with purple, white, grey, and green as base colors from the 1980s. From the 1990s, Nakanishi also engaged in producing installations keenly conscious of paintings and the exhibition space for them. Nakanishi continued to address the very basic problems of paintings until his last years.

For creating paintings, Nakanishi used paintbrushes with handles as long as two meters to gently touch canvases. Colors painted with delicate brush touches and free motions of lines were instrumental to realize Nakanishi’s distinctive abstract paintings.