Kazuo Nakamura

Kazuo Nakamura (1926-2002)

Linear Structure, 1957

Oil and String 16” x 22”

Additional Images

Meet the Artist

Artist Origin: Canada (Vancouver, BC; later Toronto, ON)
Artist Type: Founding Member of Painters Eleven; Abstract and Landscape Painter; Mathematics-based Abstractionist
Born: October 13, 1926 (Vancouver, British Columbia)
Died: April 9, 2002 (Toronto, Ontario)

Kazuo Nakamura (1926–2002) stands as one of the most introspective and intellectually rigorous voices in Canadian modernism. A co-founder of Painters Eleven, he pursued a quieter, more meditative form of abstraction rooted in structure, number, and natural order. His early landscapes and later mathematical compositions reflect a lifelong search for harmony between science and art — a vision shaped in part by the upheaval of his wartime internment. Today, Nakamura’s work is celebrated for its restraint, clarity, and its singular contribution to the evolution of abstraction in Canada.

Publications

John G. Hatch, Kazuo Nakamura: Life & Work (Art Canada Institute, 2021).
A rigorous, peer-reviewed monograph that provides the most comprehensive analysis of Nakamura’s practice — essential for understanding how his numerical systems, structural grids, and landscapes fit into the broader history of Canadian abstraction and affect long-term market significance.