Kumi Sugai

Signal B by Kumi Sugaï. 1974 Lithograph hand signed and numbered by the artist 169/190. The lithograph is unframed. It will be shipped insured overseas in a custom made wooden crate. Cost of transport to the US is crate included. Sugai began his career in advertising for the Japanese railway...

“Untitled” Serigraphy on plexiglass with “Sugaï Ed 150 Gendai Hanga Center” inscribed on the base. Kumi Sugai (1919-1996) belonged to the first group of pioneering contemporary Japanese artists to adopt western styles of painting, and to practice them abroad, chiefly in Paris or New York. Though he was born and bred in Kobe, his parents were of Malay origin, belonging to a family of excellent musicians. He studied art at the Osaka School of Fine Arts, where he became acquainted with western painting techniques through the teaching of Yoshihara Haruyoshi. At the same time he practiced calligraphy and was fascinated by typography, both of which were to play an important part of his later work. Like so many Japanese writers and artists, he dropped out of school and his first job was with the Hankyu Railway Company (1937) where he was their commercial designer and a creator of advertising posters. Sugai left for Paris in 1952, where he found Abstract Impressionism to be the prevailing style, the first of many movements he was to encounter and learn from, ranging from Pop and Op to Antiart, Kinetic Art to Minimalism. He began by adapting traditional ukiyoe woodblock techniques to his personal vision of a foreign culture. The forms were contemporary, but the colors had the simplicity and radiant purity of the classic masters of the art that enraptured Van Gogh and the Post Impressionists. He also experimented with silk-screen printing and lithography. Complete work: L’oeuvre Gravé 1955-1996 By Art Dune 1996 Bibliography: – Sugai J. Lassaigne, Galerie Creuzevault, Paris, 1958 – Sugai A.P. de Mandiargues Paris, 1960 – K. Sugai by G. Boudaille by Court Gallery & American Art Gallery, Copenhagen, 1965 – K. S. – Lo zodiaco by A. Pieyre de Mandiargues, Edizioni Centro Arte Annunciata, Milano, 1974 – Kumi Sugai by Jean-Luc Chalumeau, Cercle d’Art, 1995 The Gendai Hanga Center was established in 1974 to exhibit gendai hanga, contemporary Japanese art prints...

Two screenprints in color, both signed in pencil, one numbered 131/150. Presented in quality new black stained ash frames. About the artist: Painter and print-maker: born Kobe, Jap...