Cutting out the Sky: Kenji Nakahashi—Selections from the Museum’s Collection August 13, 2019–January 1, 2020
Kenji Nakahashi, Untitled [Airplane Suspended], c. 1980, gouache, graphite, and ink on wove paper, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, gift of an anonymous donor in memory of Kenji Nakahashi. © Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents
Kenji Nakahashi, Circus, c. 1980, watercolor over graphite on wove paper, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, gift of an anonymous donor in memory of Kenji Nakahashi. © Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents
Kenji Nakahashi, Time - (B), 1980, printed 1985, gelatin silver print, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, gift of Anne Wilkes Tucker in honor of Anne H. Bushman. © Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents
Kenji Nakahashi, Untitled, 1985–86, chromogenic print, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, gift of an anonymous donor in memory of Kenji Nakahashi and in honor of Anne Wilkes Tucker. © Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents
Kenji Nakahashi, “A Cut Out Sky” (Thames St. between Broadway & Trinity Pl. N.Y.C.), 1979, chromogenic print, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, gift of an anonymous donor in memory of Kenji Nakahashi and in honor of Anne Wilkes Tucker. © Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents
Kenji Nakahashi, Going Insane, 1979, photoetching on wove paper, artist’s proof, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, gift of an anonymous donor in memory of Kenji Nakahashi. © Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents
In 1973 Kenji Nakahashi gave up his brief career in design and left his native Japan for New York City, where he lived and worked until his death. Although best known for his photo-based Conceptual art, Nakahashi (1947–2017) moved fluidly between mediums, experimenting with painting, drawing, and printmaking, in addition to photography.
Cutting out the Sky presents works from a recent gift to the MFAH of nearly 50 prints, drawings, and photographs from the 1970s and 1980s. Fascinated by the world around him, Nakahashi found creative inspiration in even the most mundane subjects—every new place he visited and each passing thought provided the spark for inventive, whimsical, humorous, or contemplative images.
In his photographs, Nakahashi toyed with expectations, playing with the disjunction of text and image, tricking the unobservant viewer into believing that time has weight or physical dimension, and rendering the rushing heights of New York skyscrapers as simple, flat abstractions. In his prints and drawings, uncanny shapes and forms that are almost, but not quite, familiar explore the strange and wonderful beauty of life’s everyday objects.
Cutting out the Sky: Kenji Nakahashi—Selections from the Museum’s Collection | August 13, 2019–January 1, 2020
This exhibition is organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.