My Mandala-a

After finishing what is now Saitama Prefectural Kumagaya High School, Suda studied at Kawabata Gagakko. During the Second World War, he moved from Urawa to the Kansai region. After the war, he switched to abstract painting and presented his work at Kokugakai. From 1976, he resumed working on figurative painting too and produced abstract and figurative works in parallel. He was also known for the illustrations he did for Kaido wo Yuku (On the Highways), a book of essays by Ryotaro Shiba, and his manly and bighearted calligraphy.

This was presented as Work 1964 at Forty Years at Kokugakai, an exhibition held in 1966, and later retitled. Three forms each combining a large circle and a seed-like kernel are arranged as if struggling against each other. The speedy brushwork and the wound-like vivid traces of the painting knife enhance the unstable impression and make it a composition overflowing with harsh force. Stimulated by many artists and avant-garde calligraphers in the art circles of the Kansai region, which was full of life after the war, during the 1950s and the 1960s, Kokuta Suda worked on abstract painting in earnest. This group of works was not created from a concept but was conceived as an act of struggling with paintbrush or knife in hand with a pure spirit. It also emerged from the materiality of the striking colors of the paint and the canvas and the artist’s own fervent view of the plastic arts gushes out.