Kazuo Nakamura was a Japanese-Canadian painter and sculptor (1926 - 2002) and a founding member of the Toronto-based Painters Eleven group in the 1950s. Nakamura produced abstract paintings that were distinctive among Canadian artists of his generation in part because of their formal simplicity and rigour.
"Influenced by Jock Macdonald’s interest in Hungarian painter and photographer (and teacher at the Bauhaus art school in Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s) László Moholy-Nagy and his own reading in science journals, Nakamura was often concerned with science, time and space. As is evident in his “inner structure” paintings of the 1950s, Nakamura described himself as seeking a "fundamental universal pattern in all art and nature." Later, in the 1970s and 1980s, he increasingly emphasized grid paintings based on number structures, which came to involve the Pascal triangle, an array of number relationships associated with triangles studied by 17th-century French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal. To Nakamura, these laboriously inscribed works were a quest for some ultimate order in the apparent chaos of the universe. "(thecanadianencyclopedia.ca)
"Influenced by Jock Macdonald’s interest in Hungarian painter and photographer (and teacher at the Bauhaus art school in Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s) László Moholy-Nagy and his own reading in science journals, Nakamura was often concerned with science, time and space. As is evident in his “inner structure” paintings of the 1950s, Nakamura described himself as seeking a "fundamental universal pattern in all art and nature." Later, in the 1970s and 1980s, he increasingly emphasized grid paintings based on number structures, which came to involve the Pascal triangle, an array of number relationships associated with triangles studied by 17th-century French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal. To Nakamura, these laboriously inscribed works were a quest for some ultimate order in the apparent chaos of the universe. "(thecanadianencyclopedia.ca)
