Natsuyuki Nakanishi 1935-2016
Nakanishi began his artistic career at the end of the 1950s with a highly acclaimed series of paintings entitled Rhyme, followed by the co-founding of the radical collective Hi-Red Center, which was active from 1962-64 with the other members including Jiro Takamatsu and Genpei Akasegawa. His collaborations with the Butoh dancers Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ono since 1965 greatly informed his thinking and practice aiming to make paintings between the corporeal and the painterly. Nakanishi believed painting occupies a special realm, and the painter wanders through this realm, functioning as a sort of mediator between the work and the viewer. His phenomenological and epistemological inquiry into the medium continued later in his career as he would become known for several series of canvases featuring subdued palettes and idiosyncratic markings.
Nakanishi has had solo exhibitions at numerous museums, including: Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art (1985), Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art (1995/2002), Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (1997), Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art (2004/2012), The Shoto Museum of Art (2008). His works have also been shown in notable group exhibitions such as, Japanese Art After 1945: Scream against the Sky, Yokohama Museum of Art, Guggenheim Soho, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1994); Tokyo, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2013); and Our Ecology: Toward a Planetary Living, Mori Art Museum (2023).