Makiko Nakamura: Floating Worlds

Makiko Nakamura (b. Japan, 1951) has sustained a quietly rigorous painting practice for more than five decades, shaped by early training in calligraphy and traditional Japanese painting and guided by discipline, repetition, and patience. Her works unfold slowly over months, built through the careful layering and sanding back of simple structures, grids, circles, and fields of colour, so that each surface carries the visible record of its own making. Often described by the artist as archaeological, this process reveals time as a material in itself, allowing traces of memory and decision to emerge through restraint rather than gesture. In recent paintings, structure softens and colour appears to float, creating a meditative pictorial space informed by titles drawn from constellations and the language of longing. Neither monumental nor declarative, Nakamura’s paintings offer a place of stillness and simplicity, where tradition and freedom, structure and tenderness, exist in quiet balance.

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