Painting Untitled by Nobuhiko NUKATA

A green lattice grid is rendered in oil over a dark blue ground, the paint handling visibly brushed rather than mechanically applied. This work belongs to the earlier, more painterly phase of Nukata’s grid practice, sometimes described as his “jungle gym” period: a grid drawn in color over a colored ground, developed from the mid-1990s. It predates the artist’s later and more radical reduction of the method, in which he abandoned drawn grids and colored grounds altogether in favor of single-color oil applied directly along the weave of unbleached linen over a uniform white ground, a stricter, near-monochrome system that became his primary mode from the 2000s onward. As such, this canvas represents Nukata’s grid style at its formative, more expressive stage, prior to the disappearance of visible brushwork and palette into pure system. The original Galerie Humanité Tokyo label is affixed to the stretcher verso. A handwritten inscription is also present on the reverse, apparently comprising a signature and the date ’95 alongside a partially struck-through line of text; legibility has not been fully established from photograph and should be confirmed against the physical object.

Nukata Nobuhiko was born in 1963 in Osaka Prefecture. He graduated with a BA in oil painting from Aichi Prefectural University of the Arts in 1988, receiving the Kuwahara Prize for best graduation work, and completed his MA at the same institution in 1990, studying under Shimada Shozo and Hitsuda Shin’ya alongside contemporaries Nara Yoshitomo and Kobayashi Takanobu. Initially working in a figurative mode, he began developing his signature grid-based style from the mid-1990s, the mode represented by this work. Across statements on his practice, Nukata has described the grid as a deliberate constraint intended to strip away subjective gesture and arbitrariness from painting, in pursuit of a form of perception that reaches beyond personal style toward something more universal. This concern places him closer in spirit to artists such as On Kawara and Blinky Palermo, both rule-based, system-driven painters he has written on directly, including a published essay on Palermo for the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, than to the modernist grid tradition of Mondrian.

Over time his method grew progressively more reduced, moving from the colored, handdrawn lattices of the 1990s toward a stricter system of single-color paint applied along the linen’s own weave, culminating in the “F.P.M.S.” series (2018), which uses standard pre-made Japanese stretcher sizes as the determining structure of the work. In 1999– 2000 he resided in London on a grant from the Pola Art Foundation. He currently serves as professor of oil painting at Aichi Prefectural University of the Arts, and in 2014 cofounded the painting collective GROUND together with Kobayashi Takanobu, Maruyama Naofumi, Takahashi Nobuyuki, and Igari Masanori.

Compare (exhibition history of the artist; not exhibitions of this specific work): Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Contemporary Art, “MOT Collection Special: Chronicle 1995–” (2014); Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, “Spider’s Thread” (2016); Kiscelli Museum, Budapest, “Existence’s Dream” (1997).