Katsumi Nakai: Works 1965–1997 marks the first US solo gallery exhibition for the late Japanese artist, spanning three decades of his defining years in Milan. Arriving in 1964 after leaving Japan's postwar avant-garde scene, Nakai entered the circle of the Nuova Scuola di Milano alongside Lucio Fontana, Enrico Castellani, and Agostino Bonalumi, absorbing Fontana's Spatialism as a foundation. Departing from gestural abstraction, he began probing and breaching the pictorial surface through reliefs of folded and hinged wood that test dimensionality and challenge the viewer's space. The works knit together Western abstraction and Eastern tradition into a transnational practice concerned with time, space, and the limits of the canvas.
