Lot 34: NAOTO NAKAGAWA

NAOTO NAKAGAWA B. 1944 PINK RIVER signed and dated '85 ; signed, titled and dated 1985 on the reverse acrylic on canvas 83 by 59 in. 210.8 by 149.9 cm

New York, Japan Society Gallery, Contemporary Japanese Art in America: Arita, Nakagawa, Sugimoto, May - June 1987, no. 5, p. 47. illustrated in color
Tokyo, Fuji Television Gallery, Naoto Nakagawa: Recent Paintings 1985 - 1991, March - April 1991, no. 2, p. 21, illustrated in color

Fuji Television Gallery, Tokyo
Private Collection, New Jersey
Acquired by the present owner from the above

Nakagawa's roots as a painter go back to his maternal grandfather Murakami Kagaku, a famous Japanese artist, and to his early painting classes with Kikunami Joji, a member of the Gutai group, whose action based art and performances had a profound influence on him in his youth.



Steeped in a tradition of nature painting Nakagawa is also acutely aware of the power of simple everyday objects which he juxtaposes with startling results. Creating surfaces that are brilliantly detailed and pristine, the artist infuses his canvases with a tension which forces the viewer to confront familiar objects in a new way. In his large canvases, nature is both loved and transformed, devoured in a headlong quest for a deeper truth, the peeled-back essence of things.



"Whether hard-edge or painterly, his brush depicts objects with exquisite and equivalent detail regardless of their scale or distance from the viewer, creating what appears to be a world of superhuman vision. As if everything were seen from the perspective of an insect, up-close and exaggerated." (Exh. Cat. Alexandra Munroe, "Nakagawa's Sight," Triple X: Extended, Exploded, Extracted Naoto Nakagawa 1965-1975, White Box, New York, p. 8)

Pink River is one of the artist's most celebrated works of the 1980s. A lush, exuberant composition, it overflows with richness and saturated color. Here Asia (the Chinese vase and white peonies) links to Africa (a Dan mask); the Americas (a Hopi rug) and Europe (the parrot tulips). Mountains and sea, reflected in the jutting rock and the spiny shell, point outwards to the edges. Running through it all is the pink river, a roll of glittery shelf paper such as one finds in any store of downtown Chinatown.

Writing in the catalogue of a major retrospective at the Fuji Television Gallery in Tokyo, in which this work was included, Dore Ashton deciphers the secret of the paintings of the 1980s:



"In the mid-1980s he painted large and masterful still-lifes in which there appears a new preoccupation with getting as close as possible to the very skin of nature. . . .Once Nakagawa told me a story – a myth or parable – of a god who invented everything, created everything in existence, but left a little space empty. When he was done, he jumped in. Nakagawa, a painter in his best years, has, at last, jumped in." (Exh. Cat. Dore Ashton, Naoto Nakagawa: Recent Paintings 1985 - 1991, Fuji Television Gallery, Tokyo, p. 11)