For the first edition of Art Basel Qatar, Luxembourg + Co. will present a display of sculpture-paintings by the Japanese artist Katsumi Nakai (1927-2013), a rare modern artist who extensively explored the magical potential of hinges; born in 1927 in Hirakata, Japan, Nakai belonged to a generation shaped by the trauma of World War II, and his postwar travels and cultural explorations led him to develop a unique artistic vocabulary rooted in the concept of “opening-up.”
Nakai was thirty-seven when he first arrived in Milan, where he would spend the most prolific decades of his career (1964–1996); though never fluent in Italian, he quickly became a notable figure in the city’s art scene, particularly associated with the vibrant Galleria del Naviglio alongside artists such as Nobuya Abe, Agostino Bonalumi, Enrico Castellani, and Lucio Fontana, and while he initially worked in an expressive abstract style, by the mid-1960s he had developed a distinctive method of cutting and assembling wooden panels with hinges to create paintings of remarkable complexity.