PHILADELPHIA, PA.- Moderne Gallery is presenting George Nakashima: Foundations of Form.
The exhibition presents an exploration of George Nakashima’s (1905-1990) early designs which display a truly unique vision and an inspired progression of innovation and spirit.
The early works featured serve as a testament to Nakashima’s distinct, intuitive, and naturalistic design language which captures a harmony between the natural world and the vivacity of the modern experience.
Widely recognized as one of the most important woodworkers and designers of the 20th century, Nakashima is best known for the work he produced from the 1960s onward. However, it is within his foundational work that we see the emergence of a distinct, deeply personal visual and philosophical vocabulary – one that would ultimately shape the course of his career and legacy.
Featured in the exhibition are early designs that came to fruition conceptually and physically as a result of Nakashima’s extensive formative experiences which include formal architecture education in the United States and France, travel and work experience throughout Europe and Asia, early work in Seattle, Washington, internment in Minidoka Relocation Center, a concentration camp in Hunt, Idaho, during WWII, and his eventual settling in New Hope, Pennsylvania from 1943 onwards.
In particular, Nakashima’s early work defines aesthetic signatures and vocabulary, many of which subverted dominant visual and manufacturing trends, which he continually built upon during his life journey as a woodworker. For example, Nakashima’s, atypical of the era, use and celebration of revealed joinery foretells his life-long exploration of the decorative possibilities of structural, constructive elements. Counter to prevalent construction and aesthetics of the period, Nakashima was vehemently opposed to decorative veneers and noted that the reduction of boards to thin sheets and the camouflaging of a work’s construction was not only immoral, but that it denied the wood’s essential nature.
Additionally, the incorporation of the free, or live, sap edge of the board presents itself early in Nakashima’s oeuvre, marking a truly innovative and iconic design element. Allowing the tree’s natural, biomorphic form to lead the design process is the central ethos of Nakashima’s work and a notion which he believed provided the soul of the tree with a second life.
Evidently tangible and of central focus in early work onward, Nakashima also strongly revered handcraftsmanship, the use of solely natural material, and a small workshop approach as opposed to the era’s prevailing mass-produced manufacturing trends and materiality. From the early period onward, these values defined Nakashima’s designs and production and imbued his work with a strong sense of quality, organicism, and humanity amongst a global landscape that increasingly favored mass-produced, synthetic product.
Ultimately, to truly understand the context and fullness-of-vision that Nakashima’s oeuvre encompasses, one must look to his early work to experience the innovative, spiritual inception of his philosophical, aesthetic, and constructional methodology and vernacular.
-Damian Munoz, Moderne Gallery
