Top image: Minoru Nomata Skyglow- H11 2008 © the artist Courtesy White Cube 

White Cube’s newly unveiled online programme introduces the futurist work of Japanese artist Minoru Nomata, whose extraordinary and largely underappreciated career spans the last four decades.

Whether painting or drawing, Nomata’s oeuvre is grounded in architecture and modernity. With his repertoire of imaginary buildings, monoliths and cityscapes, many of which could be mistaken as location sketches for Blade Runner or Dune, Nomata combines his love of architecture with a dystopian sense of past and future.

In order to appreciate the quasi-photographic quality of Nomata’s work, it is important to consider the influence of US painter and commercial photographer Charles Sheeler, who helped pioneer Precisionism in the early 20th century. Alongside his contemporaries, Sheeler produced paintings of industrial architecture and the modernisation of America’s urban landscapes in a minimal yet highly realistic style which, despite ceding to a rise of Modernism in the 30s, would influence marketing posters for decades.

It’s no surprise therefore to learn that Nomata began his career in advertising before leaving after five years to focus on his art. Sheeler’s influence, combined with the rapid modernisation Nomata witnessed in Tokyo during the 80s, helped foster an interest in fantastical, blue-sky architecture of the future.

In his Windscapes and Points of View series however, Nomata looks to the past with hulking, monolithic monuments made of rock. They are simultaneously timeless and unique, imposing and melancholic, vast yet lonely, embodying Nomata’s fragile state of mind during the mid-90s when his daughter fell dangerously ill.

In addition to Babel, Nomata’s 2012 painting of the Biblical tower that he re-imagines as the terrifying HQ of some despotic government, the exhibition’s major highlight includes Element Drawings. This series of works was originally produced in response to the 2011 tsunami after Japanese newspaper The Asahi Shimbun invited Nomata to produce a weekly drawings. The resulting body of over 200 drawings, all of which are no bigger than a CD case, represent what was an opportunity for Nomata to broadcast his own personal sense of grief and address the mood of national mourning.

Minoru Nomata is available until 2 July 2020. View the online exhibition here.