Nagakura Kenichi: A Retrospective
June 28, 2024–July 20, 2024
Bamboo artist Nagakura Kenichi visited Santa Fe every other year for nearly two decades, meeting art lovers and collectors at the openings for his nine solo shows at TAI Modern. He and his wife Kayoko made many friends in the process. His tenth solo show would have opened in the summer of 2018 if not for his untimely death that year. Since then, TAI Modern has looked forward to mounting a retrospective exhibition to honor Nagakura’s creative genius, and to also, in a sense, bring him back to his friends in Santa Fe. This June, we can finally give him his tenth solo exhibition.
Nagakura lived a life of profound experimentation, incorporating unconventional materials like bamboo roots, washi paper, and driftwood collected from local shores on daily walks, as well as inventing new techniques that evoked the patina and texture of centuries-old bamboo, bronze, rock, wood, cloth and natural phenomena like nests, webs, and cocoons. First and foremost, he was an artist, and it was through his connection to bamboo that he could express that creative drive. According to Nagakura, “For me, bamboo is what pigment is for a painter or stone is for a sculptor. Discovering their true medium is a profound pleasure for an artist. When the sensitivities of both artist and the material are in sync, the medium becomes the voice, flesh, and heart of the artist.”
Nagakura was never affiliated with either of the two prominent arts organizations in Japan, instead preferring to remain independent over his thirty-year long career. This freedom allowed him to let emotion and instinct guide his process, following this unpredictable path to the final creation. Certain visual motifs reappear throughout his body of work—finely-woven, abstracted human figures that grow out of a single bamboo node; rounded shapes inspired by Henry Moore; airy and curling fallen leaves; craggy and heavy-seeming reliefs and sculptures like a scholar’s stone; delicate wall-mounted baskets surrounded by a calligraphic scribble of bamboo branches–whatever the inspiration, one can always tell a Nagakura piece by its organic form, sensitivity to nature, and expressive freedom.
Showing with TAI Modern since the very start of the gallery’s focus on Japanese bamboo in 1997, Nagakura was the first recipient of the Cotsen Bamboo Prize in 2000 and exhibited internationally throughout his career in numerous solo and group shows in Japan, France, Belgium, and the United States. He is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, among many others. He was a well-loved artist, and we are proud to bring his works to Santa Fe once again. The retrospective will open on Friday, June 28 from 5—7pm at 1601 Paseo de Peralta and will run until July 20, 2024.
- 131280 Ritual Dancer