Animal in the Snow

A print depicting an animal amid snow, one of Kumi Sugai's explorations of natural forms filtered through an abstract visual language. Sugai, who moved to Paris in 1952 and became a leading figure in postwar Japanese abstraction, often drew inspiration from calligraphy, road signs, and the natural world without representing any of them literally. The animal in this composition may appear as a dark, gestural shape against a white field, the snow rendered not as a landscape but as an enveloping blankness. The tension between the organic form and the surrounding void gives the image its visual charge.