Additional Images

Provenance:

Private Collection, Toronto, ON

Exhibited:

Artist Architect Collaboration, Montreal Museum of Modern Art, presented at the Toronto International Exhibition, 1965.

Note:

A founding member of the Toronto-based collective Painters Eleven, Kazuo Nakamura played a pivotal role in the emergence of abstraction in Canada during the 1950s. While his peers gravitated toward the gestural energy of Abstract Expressionism, Nakamura’s approach was quieter, more meditative. The group was united not by a single style but by a shared commitment to artistic freedom—a principle that allowed Nakamura to pursue his own visual language rooted in science, mathematics, and the natural world. His methodical compositions, often constructed through repetition and limited palettes, reflect a search for what he described as “a fundamental universal pattern in all art and nature.”[1]

Waddington’s is pleased to offer Line Waves, 1962, an exemplary canvas from the 1960s, a period of artistic maturation for Nakamura. Produced shortly after the dissolution of Painters Eleven, as Nakamura embarked on a solo path defined by rigorous formal investigation and quiet spiritual depth.

In Line Waves, 1962, Nakamura strips painting to its barest essentials. Part of his celebrated Core Structure string painting series, this work features a set of lines created by adhering painted string across the canvas. The resulting composition is both austere and expansive.

[1] Robert Fulford, “The New World of Pattern”, Mayfair Magazine (February 1956), 46.