Crouching Woman

A figure crouches — huddled, contracted, gathering herself or himself inward — in one of Kitaoka's more psychologically charged figurative works. The crouching posture is among the most ancient of human forms in art, appearing from prehistoric sculpture through Rodin, and Kitaoka brings to it his modernist economy: the body reduced to a mass of compressed curves, the face perhaps hidden, the gesture implying either rest, grief, or concentrated thought. It is a print that asks the viewer to complete the human story the posture implies.