A major figure in the 1960s Japanese avant-garde, Natsuyuki Nakanishi began his career deploying Neo-Dadaist concepts in performances and object-based works, before turning to abstract painting. In 1963 Nakanishi co-founded the Hi-Red Center, an avant-garde installation and performance group concerned with exploring human interactions and issues of mass consumption, with the artists Jiro Takamatsu and Genpei Akasegawa. Nakanishi’s Compact Object (1960) is an egg form composed of resin fused with some of the detritus of a consumerist society—watches, clock parts, eggshells, and lenses. More recently the artist has produced large-scale paintings composed of organic-looking forms that resemble cellular activity in a palette of greens, blues, and whites, arranged in loose ring formations.