Untitled Monotype Art Print ー野村 耕

This monotype, signed by the artist on the reverse “K. Nomura” reflects Nomura Kō’s engagement with automatistic mark-making during the height of Japan’s postwar avant-garde experimentation. Produced through the transfer of ink, the monotype allowed Nomura to pursue an image that arises through process rather than premeditated composition. Across the dark ground, networks of sharp white lines crisscross in rapid succession—scratched, dragged, and incised into the ink before printing. These marks create a complex lattice of trajectories that alternately suggest mechanical diagrams, calligraphic gestures, or the erratic pathways of thought itself. The monotype process is central to the work’s vitality. Because the image can be printed only once, each impression preserves a singular moment of action—an irreversible record of the artist’s gestures and the behavior of ink under pressure. The splatters, abrasions, and uneven transfers visible across the surface testify to this immediacy. Rather than presenting a controlled composition, the image unfolds as a record of movement and resistance between tool, pigment, and plate. In this sense, the work resonates with the broader interest among postwar artists in forms of automatism that bypass deliberate design. For Nomura, such methods offered a way to release the image from the conventions of representation and from the hierarchies of traditional painting. Contained within a square format, the dense web of lines appears almost explosive, as if the forces that generated it press outward against the boundaries of the paper. The work thus captures a moment of dynamic equilibrium: an image suspended between control and accident. Ink and pigment on paper in a modern frame, the work itself is 28.5 x 25.5 cm (11-1/2 x 10 inches), the frame 56.5 x 56.5 x 3 cm (roughly 22-1/2 x 22-1/2 x 1 inches) and is in excellent condition.

Nomura Ko (1927–1991) was born in Kyoto and graduated from the Nihonga Department of Kyoto Municipal College of Art in 1948. In 1950 he joined the Pan Real Art Association (until 1965), establishing himself as a significant figure in the postwar avant-garde movement in Japanese-style painting. Initially influenced by Surrealism, he shifted in the later 1950s toward abstraction and collage, employing unconventional materials such as newspaper printing molds, industrial waste, slate, and cement. From the mid 60”s he was driven beyond the framework to be a pioneer in installation exhibition, creating one-time works which allowed the room to be the frame. Through materially driven works and these later three-dimensional and spatial constructions, Nomura fundamentally redefined the physical and conceptual boundaries of Nihonga. His major exhibition history includes the aforementioned Pan Real (1950-1965), the Asahi New Artist Exhibition, the Asahi Selected Exhibition and the Contemporary Japanese Art Exhibition. Trends in Contemporary Painting (1963), and Today’s Artists ’64 (1964). From 1978 onward, he participated almost annually in the Ge Exhibition. In 1986, he was featured in A Section of Postwar Nihonga at Yamaguchi Prefectural Art Museum. A major retrospective, Kyoto Art: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow III – Nomura Ko, was held at Kyoto City Museum of Art in 1989. His work was posthumously included in The Turning Point of Postwar Nihonga at Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts in 1993, confirming his pivotal role in transforming postwar Nihonga. Work by him is held in the collections of The Kyoto National Museum of Modern Art, Fukui Fine Arts Museum, Kariya City Art Museum, Kyoto City Kyocera Museum of Art, Meguro Museum of Art in Tokyo, Nara Prefectural Museum of Art, Osaka Nakanoshima Museum of Art, Osaka Prefectural 20th Century Art Collection, Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Art, Toyohashi City Museum of Art, Wakayama Museum of Modern Art, Yamaguchi Prefectural Art Museum, Sakuragaoka Museum, The, Kyoto University Art Museum and Kyoto City University of Arts among others.