Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura
Closes March 16
Who hasn't taken pleasure looking at clouds and imagining shapes and forms in their billowy masses? The late-career paintings of Kiyoshi Nakagami, on display at a career retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura (www.moma.pref.kanagawa.jp) make a play for this territory, but there are important differences too.
The works at Kamakura, like the ones seen at the exhibition "Nihonga Painting: Six Provocative Artists" at the Yokohama Museum of Art in 2006, lack definition and are shrouded in murkiness. Instead of the delights of watching clearly delineated puffs of white moving against a blue background, we are offered gradations of gray with an obscured light source that could either be a stormy sky or a glimpse of moonlight through the clouds.
That titles are not provided reveals the artist's intention to maintain ambiguity. The result is to create atmosphere, mood and a nebulous sense of the sublime. Despite his use of the nontraditional medium of acrylic paint, these evocative abstractions are attempts to follow the strain of nihonga (Japanese-style painting) that seeks to re-create a sense of nature in the viewer's mind by getting at the essence of things rather than slavishly copying in them.
Along with 11 of Nakagami's latest paintings, there are 13 earlier ones — vivid, flat areas of color influenced by the abstract illusions of Op Art, and versions of Japanese biombo (golden screens). These suggest an artist formerly in thrall to the superficialities of nihonga, while his recent works, by contrast, suggest a similar overemphasis on essence.
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