Hiroshi Nakamura (artist)

Hiroshi Nakamura (中村 宏, Nakamura Hiroshi, born September 20, 1932 Shizuoka Prefecture) is a Japanese artist who has worked in 'reportage' and surrealist styles. Nakamura attended Nihon University and was involved in many artist groups and social movements such as the Zen'ei Bijutsu-kai (Avant-garde Art Society) and the Seinen Bijustuka Rengō. He is often associated with Reportage Painting, the movement that sought to report on the social issues that arose out of the postwar context by engaging first-hand with the local peoples and their struggles. His Suganaga No. 4 of 1955 exemplifies the concern and style of Reportage that is considered a major As postwar reconstruction of Japan progressed, Nakamura's interest in Reportage evolved into an interrogation of the artist's role in "viewing" the fundamentals of the political and social realms. Into the 1960s, in collaboration with Kōichi Tateishi, Nakamura devised the concept of Kankō geijutsu (sightseeing art) and, as an extension, he individually developed a painting style centering around trains and female students in uniform situated in an eerie surrealistic dream-like world. Among other influences, he was inspired by Sergei Eisenstein's montage theory and Akira Kurosawa's films which contributed to his signature distortion of perspective that he developed through his career.