"La quête sans fin" (1962) Printmaking by Kumi Sugaï

Kumi Sugaï (Teizo Sugaï, known) is a Japanese painter of the 20th century, born March 13, 1919 in Kobe, died May 14, 1996 in the same city. He is also an engraver, lithographer, sculptor, calligrapher. His first paintings are playful, representing figures, landscapes, animals. Starting from figurative art, it then evolved towards informal art then towards abstract expressionism to lead to an increasingly geometric abstract art qualified as abstract hard edge following geometrization by Piet Mondrian. 

He settled in Paris in 1952, fleeing post-war Japan whose rigidity he could not stand. Trained in Japanese and Western artistic traditions, upon his arrival in France he devoted himself to materialist painting with abstract signs which nevertheless suggest animal or human realities. Sugaï was then close to the informal art community and benefited in particular from the support of critics Jean-Clarence Lambert and Roger van Gindertael. Despite his life far removed from all worldly agitation, devoted entirely to work, he was noticed, from his first exhibition at the Salon in October 1952, by the gallery owner John Craven and quickly gained notoriety. His style evolved at the beginning of the 1960s: the contours became geometric, oil competed with acrylic, the colors were bright, the texture smoothed. Urban signage is present through formal allusions. Large in size, these works have the immediacy of hard edge and the visual impact of pop. However, they are unique in France, especially since Sugaï works in isolation. The work Untitled, 1986, represents the ultimate evolution of Sugaï's art, when motifs borrowed from nature and variations in the work of the material reappear. The concentric waves, on the lower panel, and the sun, on the triangular panel, are present in works from the same period, where they are combined in multiple ways with other motifs of which the series remains limited. Even more than in the previous period, these works remain unique in the artistic landscape. Their effectiveness is due to the energetic charge that the patterns release, due in particular to the opening of the rays and the widening of the waves, to the contrast between the expansion of red and the weight of black. Neither descriptive elements nor formal signs, these elements, combined by the assembly of frames with variable shapes, invite the viewer to a physical contemplation. 

©Anne Malherbe

Source:
 Extract from the catalog Modern art collection - The collection of the Center Pompidou, National Museum of Modern Art, under the direction of Brigitte Leal, Paris, Center Pompidou, 2007

• Nationality: JAPAN
• Date of birth : 1919
• Artistic domains: Works by professional artists, Represented by a Gallery,
• Groups: Professional Artist Contemporary Japanese Artists Artists presented by a gallery