Nakahashi, Kenji

Japanese, 1947 - 2017

BiographyKenji Nakahashi made photographs, prints, paintings, and drawings that were playful and ironic to abstract and contemplative. Nakahashi often worked in the studio, photographing staged scenes that explored the immateriality of time. For other projects, he wandered the streets of New York and experimented with perspective, as seen in his minimal and geographic depictions of skyscrapers intersecting with the sky. The images in the MoCP permanent collection are indicative of Nakahashi’s perpetual curiosity about the routine, yet enigmatic concepts, moments, and objects we interact with daily.

Kenji Nakahashi received a BFA (1971) and MFA (1973) in Design from Aichi Prefectural University of Fine Arts, Japan. He moved to New York after graduate school where he worked as an illustrator and continued his arts education at Pratt Institute (1976) and the Art Students League (1980). Nakahashi has had solo exhibitions at Berkshire Museum, Massachusetts; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Allen Memorial Art Museum, Ohio; and various others. His work is in the permanent collections of Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; Library of Congress, Washington D.C.; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; among others.