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Biography

Exhibitions

Selected History

  • 1933

    Enrolls at Osaka University of the Arts

  • 1952

    Moves to Paris

  • 1953

    Exhibition, Salon d’Octobre, Paris 1954 Solo exhibition, Galerie Craven, Paris
    Solo exhibition, Palais Beaux-Art, Brussels

  • 1955

    Solo exhibition, St George’s Gallery, London

  • 1961

    First Prize, Ljubljana International PrintBiennial, Slovenia 1962 Gold Prize, Venice Biennial, Italy

  • 1965

    Grand Prize, Sao Paulo Biennial, Brazil

  • 1966

    Grand Prize, Krakow International Print Biennial, Poland

  • 1967

    Severely injured in a high-speed car crash outside of Paris yet survives miraculously

  • 1968

    Embarks on one-year hiatus after accident

  • 1969

    Triumphantly returns to Japan for the first time since 1952 and embraced with celebrity-like status

  • 1970-

    Returns back and forth from Japan and Europe until his death in 1996

Awards

Public Collections

Selected Public Collections

  • The Metropolitan Museum of Art, USA

  • Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, USA

  • Museum of Fine Arts Boston, USA

  • Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, USA

  • The Art Institute of Chicago, USA

  • Brooklyn Museum, USA

  • Los Angeles County Museum of Art, USA

  • San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, USA

  • Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, USA

  • Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK

  • Le Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France

  • National Museum, Oslo, Norway

  • Boymans-Van Beuningen Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

  • Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany

  • Gothenburg Museum of Art, Sweden

  • The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Japan

  • Bridgestone Museum of Art, Tokyo, Japan

  • The National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan

  • The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, Japan

  • Museum of Modern Art, Toyama, Japan

  • The Yokohama Museum of Art, Japan

  • The Hyogo Prefecture Museum of Modern Art, Kobe, Japan

  • Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art, Japan

菅井汲 Kumi
Sugai Kumi
Sugai

Akatsuki (Dawn) | Oil on Canvas
H195 x W129.8 cm
Kumi
Sugai
Profile
  • 1919 Born in Kobe, Japan
  • 1996 Passes away in Kobe, Japan
  • 01 Exhibitions More
  • 02 Public Collections More

About
the ArtistAbout
the Artist

Born in 1919 in Kobe, Japan, Kumi Sugai’s abstract paintings recount an ancient time when calligraphy and magic were entwined, inseparable and nearly insurmountable in their power and potency, their vivaciousness juxtaposed with the visceral urgency of now. His early paintings have an immediate and elegantly elegiac vibrancy, conjuring primordial narratives of life, death, love, loss, victory, tragedy and transcendence, and can be seen as gateways to the world of creation within the mind’s eye of this magician-scribe-painter. One of the great abstract expressionists of postwar Japan who preceded the Gutai School artists on their path to Paris, Sugai was an iconoclast and an inspiration for his fellow compatriots of the era.

Since leaving for Paris in 1952, Sugai’s career soon garnered critical acclaim. Befriending Giacometti and fellow Japanese painter Hisao Domoto, among many others, Sugai's early solo shows in Paris and Brussels quickly cemented his reputation as a pioneer that, in hindsight, foreshadowed the dawn of both Informel and the Gutai.
Winning a flurry of awards since his Paris debut, the artist would establish himself as one of Japan’s leading abstract painters, and reached the zenith of his popularity in the mid-1960’s. However, Sugai is typically associated today with his later-period lithographs and geometric paintings featuring bright primary colours, which are far more in number than the sublime works he had produced during his Paris era. In essence, it is the body of rare and precious abstract oils that Sugai painted in the 1950’s to 1960’s that remain most appreciated by museums and collectors alike, and which do not often come on the open market due to their scarcity. With the skyrocketing hunger for works by the Gutai School and other post-war Abstract painters from Japan, the demand and value of Sugai's Paris period works have also increased tenfold, most recently with the record hammer prices seen at the November 2015 auction at Phillips in London.

WorksWorks

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