KATSUMI NAKAI
Works 1965-1997
Polina Berlin Gallery, New York, May 11 to August 7, 2026
By Gwenaël Kerlidou, July 22, 2026
L'oggeto si sboccia, 44-70, 1972, acrylic on plywood with hinges, 8.6 x 7.8 in., courtesy Ronchini Gallery, London.
In our day and age of ever accelerating instant communication and of blanket information saturation, we may presume that we have a good sense, at least superficially, of what is going on around us, of how we got here and of where we are headed from there. Once in a while, though, a new piece of information will entirely recast our understanding of the moment in a new light, prompting us to reconsider the story we liked to tell ourselves about it until then. In terms of our contemporary art narrative, Katsumi Nakai’s (1927-2013) current show at Polina Berlin in Chelsea may be one of those rare events.
This is the artist’s first solo show in New York. If it was previously included with sculptor Isamu Noguchi in a two person show in late 2024 at the Luxembourg and Co. Gallery on Madison Avenue, Nakai’s work seems to have mostly flown under the critical radar in New York. But following his late official recognition in Japan, and since the artist’s passing, the rediscovery of his oeuvre has been gathering momentum in Europe, with one-person shows in 2018 at the Ronchini Gallery in London, UK, at Studio Gariboldi, Milan, Italy, and in late 2023, with “Unfolding”, a substantial exhibition with a catalogue at Luxembourg and Co. in London.
Katsumi Nakai’s improbable itinerary, from Osaka to Milan and back is a fitting example of an alternative scenario to the typical Western art narrative. Coming out of Japan with a Gutai influenced style of painting, at age 37 Nakai embarked on a tour of major Western art cities, the final destination of which was to be New York. Arriving in Milan in the summer of 1964, he decided to settle there, and, while never fully learning the language, befriended Lucio Fontana and his circle. He would exhibit regularly in Italy over the next thirty years. Besides Fontana’s towering figure, the vibrant Italian art scene of the early sixties in Milan and Rome included many notable figures such as Piero Manzoni, Enrico Castellani, Agostino Bonalumi, Rodolfo Arico, Carla Accardi, Dadamaino, etc., who all questioned the conventions of painting from different angles. Also, thanks to Fontana’s years in Argentina, Milan was exposed to other influences than the Paris-New York axis, such as the Madi school, which offered an alternative to that polarization.
Around 1965, Nakai began to develop a new style of work made of thin plywood cut-out shapes painted in bright flat colors which were hinged on top of stretched canvas. This personal idiom would remain consistent and unchanged to the end of his life. In their hinged rotations the painted wood cut-outs exposed different parts of the canvas background and thus offered numerous reading possibilities to the viewer, never settling on one specific image. It is this literal opening up of a painting to multiple semantic potentials, not just of different readings but of different resolutions, which makes this work so unique in its context: A poetical (rather than analytical) critique of the internal logic of Western abstraction.
Exhibition view, Polina Berlin Gallery 2026, artwork photography by Stephen Probert, courtesy of Polina Berlin Gallery, NY.
It is also quite significant that the artist named an early series of this new work, between 1966 and 1976, in the language of his adopted country, “L’oggeto si sboccia” (“The Object Unfolds”, which can also translate as “The Object Blooms”). While it is worth noting that he didn’t call it “The Painting Unfolds”, this title is symptomatic on a few levels. First, because its insistence on the term “object” placed the discussion about the work squarely on a terrain defined by Donald Judd’s 1965 concept of the specific object, but with the minor difference of being an “unfolding” or “blooming” object rather than a specific one, an approach to “painting as object” from the poetic side rather than from Judd’s rhetorical side -the side which purports to frame an argument.
Beyond the vagaries of language, and the fact that similar words rarely cover exactly the same meaning from one language to the other, the second term of this Italian title -as well as the fact that the word “Unfolding” was also used as a title for the 2023 show at Luxembourg and Co.- is just as significant because it relates to a vocabulary associated, this time around, with the French deconstructionist painters of the late sixties and seventies, but with a very different outcome. For Simon Hantaï, Jean Degottex, or the members of the Supports/Surfaces’ group, the folded and unfolded unstretched canvas was intended to critique the unquestioned traditional painting support, but in a double movement of compression-expansion of the loose canvas, rather than in the literal deployment of a solid picture plane as in Nakai’s work. With this title, Nakai seems to acknowledge the two divergent schools on what painting was thought to be at the time, as well as to assert his own independence from them both.
On the other hand, as it has been noted elsewhere, the hinged wood panels also seem to relate to medieval and early renaissance European Christian paintings of unfolding altar pieces, painted on both sides, in both open and closed configurations, which are still common in Northern European medieval churches, as much as to the Japanese Origami tradition of ceremonial paper folding.
In the act of unfolding the painting, Nakai also deployed within each work a unique strategy of formal metamorphosis, from monochrome to hard edge to shaped painting, without privileging one option over another. Sometimes reminiscent of Ellsworth Kelly’s shapes of pure flat colors or of the work of Myron Stout, Paul Feeley, Nicholas Krushenick and of the early Marcia Hafif, it combined an abstract vocabulary with hints of pop inflected color and imagery.
If we were to apply American formalist critical categories to its development and to the presentation process of the “unfolded object”, the metamorphic stages of a Nakai painting would flow in the opposite direction than in Macia Hafif’s work for example. The reason for bringing her up is that the painted shapes of her Italian period sometimes seem to echo those in Nakai’s work. Since she lived in Rome from 1961 to 1969, one could entertain the thought that they possibly could have crossed paths. But in the unfolding sequence of Nakai’s paintings, the rectangular monochrome is always the first stage, followed by hard edge and shaped painting configurations, when in Hafif’s work, the reverse evolution plays out over time, from hard edge painting to the monochrome, always within the confines of the conventional rectangle.
Untitled, 2004, acrylic and oil on plywood with hinges, 27.5 x 18 in. (open), courtesy Novalis Art Design, Hong Kong.
Untitled, 2012, acrylic on plywood with hinges, 35.8 x 34.3 in. (open), courtesy Ronchini Gallery, London.
Hiraku-81-2, 2008, acrylic and oil on plywood with hinges, 144 x 72.4 in. (open), courtesy Novalis Art Design, Hong Kong.
While the minimalists, fascinated with industrial production (an affinity shared with Pop art) delegated fabrication to the factory, Nakai’s work insists on the handmade. Without being overly crafty, his paintings are put together with a very Japanese sense of economy of means and respect for traditional crafts and materials, a quality shared with Noguchi’s work. Where in the West, craft became more of a nostalgia for a lost past, as modernity was often equated with industrialization at the expense of the traditional trades, this insistence on the handmade introduced a kind of sculptural strategy in the making of a painting: the building of an object as part of the image making process. Quite a different approach from Western painters’ then mostly focused on the pictorial qualities of a mark, inscription or gesture on a predetermined surface. It is not too surprising that it would take an outsider (to the Western tradition) to bring up this unexpected solution to the endless debates on the definition of form, color, gesture, pictorial space, etc. which raged between Paris and New York at the time.
What may matter most in the end is that this was work generated outside the boundaries of a specific cultural discourse, be it Eastern-Japanese, Italian-European or American: Western art seen from the outside. One here has to take into account that after Hiroshima and the disastrous failure of the Imperial cultural model, the younger generation in Japan was eager to learn more about the newly dominant Western cultural model. But beyond the need to belong and to integrate that new model, cultural distance made independence of thought possible. For the outsider and the uprooted the breakthrough can happen perhaps because there is a lot less socially at stake for them than for someone already anchored and established within a cultural community.
This is a good example of a major artist offering a kind of synthesis between the European deconstructionist position and American minimalist positivism, who passed through the critical filter undetected and was missed by most art world actors who could have helped put his work on the historical radar: A historical blindness to an important artistic ambition due, no doubt, to Western fixation on its main institutional art narratives, oblivious to any kind of work which did not register and therefore became literally invisible only because it didn’t fit into any of the esthetic categories prevailing then in Europe and the US.
The (re)discovery of Nakai’s work at this particular juncture of our stalled historical narrative is thus a confirmation of the limits of a Western narrative too narrowly focused on itself. It confirms that the circulation of ideas in art reaches far beyond the stories we conveniently tell ourselves of how we think they came about. The larger question is of what would have happened to that narrative, had we known more and earlier of Nakai’s work, and of the many others like him, still to be discovered, as one may safely surmise. If the acknowledgment of a cultural “other” had been framed differently than in terms of “identity”, would it have possibly deflected that narrative enough to stave off our current artworld regression? A rhetorical question, if there ever was one. We might as well ask if climate change would have been more manageable had we taken its early warning signs more seriously. And we all know that answer.