Countersigned, titled and dated at the back

Exhibited: New York, Kootz Gallery, 1959  

This is a rare early work by Kumi Sugai. In 1954 Sugai has his first solo exhibition at the Galerie Craven in Paris. There he met two important art critics: Jean-Clarence Lambert and André Pieyre de Mandiargues, who devoted a monograph to him. That same year he was welcomed by the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels and the St Georges Gallery in London.

This painting is typical of Sugai's world in the 1950s. It shows forms inspired by ideograms an Japanese mythology, drawn with an expressive and dynamic gesture, freed from its linguistic function to become purely plastic.