Manika Nagare – Track of Colors – Full Collection

Artist Biography

Manika Nagare (born 1975) studied painting at the Joshibi University of Art and Design in Japan. She has been exhibiting her work in Japan, the United States, Turkey, and France among other international venues. Her work is represented by numerous international public and private collections including The Takamatsu Art Museum, Kagawa, Japan, Nerima Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan, and the Kocaeri University Museum, Turkey. UMMA was the first public institution in the U.S. to acquire Nagare’s work.

Description

Through her efforts as a painter of light and color, Manika Nagare seeks to illuminate historically little-known Japanese female artists of the last centuries. In Japan, the work of these overlooked artists was often acquired by institutions only because they were the spouse
of a famous male artist. Since 2020, Nagare has found nine such works by little-known women artists in multiple Japanese museums, traced the colors used by the nine artists in each piece, and painted each color on a canvas. A new color was layered when the previous color paint was completely dry.

All nine works from Track of Colors #1 (2022–2023) are the same height—20 1⁄2 in (52 cm)—arranged linearly and forming a kind of color coded pattern that presents the viewer with the vanishing footprints of female artists neglected in the canon of art history. Each work can be displayed singularly or in a small group, but it is Nagare’s strong intention to show the nine works together.