LONDON.- White Cube is presenting Minoru Nomata: Lithographs 1988–1998, an online exhibition devoted to a remarkable group of hand-coloured prints by the Japanese artist, whose enigmatic architectural landscapes have occupied a distinctive place in contemporary painting for more than four decades. Running from November 10, 2026, through February 2, 2027, the exhibition brings renewed attention to works produced between 1988 and 1998 and preserved for years in the artist's Tokyo archive.

Born in Tokyo in 1955, Nomata has developed a visual language centered on imaginary buildings, monumental structures and landscapes that appear simultaneously familiar and impossible. His compositions frequently depict towers, windmills, pavilions, conservatories and other architectural forms rising from empty surroundings. Although these structures contain recognizable elements such as staircases, doorways, ladders and scaffolding, their purpose remains mysterious, inviting viewers to consider places that exist somewhere between memory, invention and an uncertain future.

The exhibition offers an opportunity to examine an important aspect of Nomata's artistic practice: his exploration of lithography and the unexpected possibilities that emerged when he began transforming monochrome prints into individually hand-finished works.

Nomata first experimented with lithography in 1988, two years after his debut solo exhibition, STILL, at Tokyo's Sagacho Exhibit Space. Initially drawn to the medium as a technical challenge, he selected drawings that he believed could retain their expressive qualities without colour. Working with a printmaker who had also graduated from Tokyo University of the Arts, he discovered that variations in ink consistency, plate preparation and printing speed introduced an element of unpredictability into the process.

Rather than regarding these differences as imperfections, Nomata came to appreciate their potential to generate new visual experiences.

Years after producing the original monochrome lithographs, the artist returned to selected impressions, applying translucent layers of diluted acrylic pigment with soft watercolour brushes. Inspired by his longstanding admiration for hand-coloured photography, he approached the process as an opportunity to regain a more direct relationship with images initially produced through a mechanical printing technique.

Working alone in his studio, he frequently applied four or more layers of colour, gradually moving from lighter tones toward darker passages. The process was painstaking: Nomata generally worked on two or three prints simultaneously, with individual works sometimes requiring more than a month to complete.

The results demonstrate how relatively subtle changes in colour can profoundly affect the emotional character of an image. A structure illuminated against a blue-green sky may appear entirely different when surrounded by subdued greys and browns. Architectural forms that seem optimistic or monumental in one impression can become melancholic or mysterious in another.

Through these interventions, the artist effectively transformed printed impressions of the same composition into distinct works, each possessing its own atmosphere and visual identity.

The exhibition draws from twelve images belonging to four groups: Architectural Scenery, Sublime, Horizon and Untitled. Together, they trace an evolution in Nomata's approach to imagined environments and reveal the close relationship between his printmaking and painting.

Architectural Scenery, originally published as a portfolio in 1988 by Tokyo department store Shibuya Seibu, reflects the artist's fascination with monumental buildings and architectural fragments. The Sublime works further develop his interest in imposing vertical structures, while the later Horizon compositions move toward wider, more expansive landscapes.

These images also invite consideration of the historical circumstances in which they were conceived. Nomata's early lithographs emerged during the final years of Japan's economic bubble, a period characterized by intensive urban development and speculative construction. The subsequent collapse of the bubble in the early 1990s left unfinished projects and altered the country's architectural landscape.

Although Nomata's buildings are imaginary rather than documentary, their suspended states of construction, repair or apparent abandonment resonate with the visual consequences of that economic transformation.

The artist has suggested that his return to archaic architectural forms in the late 1980s may have been a response to the rapid construction occurring around him in Tokyo. His invented structures, however, resist straightforward historical interpretation, combining visual references from different periods and traditions.

Nomata traces his fascination with architecture to the chimney of a public bathhouse near his childhood home. Over time, this early impression developed into a broader investigation of buildings as vessels for imagination.

His sources range from books, photographs and films to historical architecture and industrial imagery. The exhibition highlights connections with Giovanni Battista Piranesi, whose imaginary prisons offered powerful visions of invented spaces, and the monumental speculative architecture of �tienne-Louis Boull�e. Nomata's precise treatment of industrial forms also recalls the work of Louis Lozowick and the photographic studies of Bernd and Hilla Becher.

In Architectural Scenery-LC5, interlocking arcades evoke Piranesi's complex architectural inventions while suggesting the spatial puzzles associated with M.C. Escher. Yet Nomata's compositions remain fundamentally different from architectural documentation. His buildings are assembled from imagination rather than reproduced from identifiable locations.

Equally significant is the absence of people throughout much of his work. Staircases lead toward unseen destinations, platforms suggest activities that never occur, and monumental structures occupy landscapes without inhabitants.

For Nomata, this absence is not necessarily intended to suggest isolation or abandonment. Human figures would introduce specific identities, scales and cultural associations, limiting the openness of the imagined environments. By excluding them, he allows the buildings to remain suspended outside conventional geography and time.

The artist's imagination has also been shaped by science fiction, travel literature and music, including exotica and the electronic sounds that emerged during the period in which these lithographs were produced. Such influences contribute to his interest in unfamiliar worlds and alternative realities.

Another important dimension of the exhibition is the relationship between painting and printmaking. Nomata's lithographs were never simply reproductions of existing paintings. Instead, ideas moved between the two mediums, with certain painted compositions generating prints and some printed images subsequently inspiring paintings.

This exchange began during a formative moment in his career. His early exhibitions STILL (1986) and ARCADIA (1988), both held at Sagacho Exhibit Space, presented paintings of imaginary buildings on freestanding supports rather than conventional gallery walls, allowing visitors to move among the works and experience their architectural qualities in physical space.

Four decades later, the lithographs provide another way of understanding the artist's sustained engagement with buildings as both objects and imaginative propositions.

Presented online, Lithographs 1988–1998 also draws attention to the individuality of works that originated through a reproducible medium. By carefully altering each impression through colour, Nomata challenged the boundary between print and painting, creating images whose subtle differences encourage close examination.

The exhibition ultimately reveals the consistency of Nomata's artistic concerns across different techniques and decades. Whether rendered in paint or lithographic ink, his structures stand as open-ended propositions rather than representations of specific places.

In these silent architectural worlds, the familiar becomes strange, construction merges with memory, and the boundaries separating past, present and imagined futures remain deliberately unresolved.

Minoru Nomata: Lithographs 1988–1998 is presented online by White Cube from November 10, 2026, to February 2, 2027.