Makiko Nakamura : ART SG | SINGAPORE | ARTIST IN FOCUS

Makiko Nakamura was born in Japan in 1951. In 1966 she went to art school in Kyoto to study printmaking, sculpture, film-making and painting, before working as a film editor. After the death of her Mother in 1995 she moved to Paris to resume her studies in painting and printmaking before going to Philadelphia to study at the Graduate School of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1999 she moved to Dublin where she lived and worked until 2013, taking Irish citizenship in 2011.

It was during her time in Ireland that she adopted a technique of working that has remained constant for the last twenty years, each following the same steady process over many months. The canvas begins with a single, repeating pattern or a block of colour left to dry before being overpainted with another and another, until she stops painting and begins to work her way back through the different layers. Her tightly controlled, painstaking technique she likens to archaeology, a process that allows her to see through time, revisiting memories hidden in the work.  

From their simple, minimalist beginning each painting takes on a more organic and expressive character. The emotional and artistic decisions of preceding months, once covered, reappearing as tantalising glimpses through the painting’s history. Examples of her work from this period can be seen at the Irish Museum of Modern Art as well as two major works commissioned for the Gate Theatre.  She now lives and works in Kyoto.