Year: 2021
Medium: oil on canvas
Dimensions: 33.3 x 24.2 cm (13 1/8 x 9 1/2 in.)
Acquired from Tomio Koyama Gallery, 2022
In the center of the bright underwater scenery, probably the southern sea, stands a girl directly gazing at the viewer. Above her head is a school of vibrant fish with a spectacular coral reef in red and pink at the bottom of the sea. Perhaps reflecting the sunlight that pours down to the seabed, the girl’s face is deeply shadowed by her hair, giving her a long face that looks oddly melancholic in this radiant sea. As the gaze moves downward to her feet, it appears as if one of her legs is entangled by something like a rope or wire. Kudo’s paintings are full of sharp colors and brightness like Fauve, but they sometimes seem ambivalent and unstable in their spirituality. Although the girl (perhaps a reflection of the artist herself) depicted in this work is calmly boasting that it is “beautiful in the sea”, while in truth, she is thinking about something entirely different in her mind. This work was exhibited in Kudo’s solo exhibition “Like When We See a Flower Bloom and Realize It Was There All Along” held at the Hiratsuka Museum of Art. It is included in both the catalogue “Like When We See a Flower Bloom and Realize It Was There All Along” (published by Tomio Koyama Gallery in 2022) of the same exhibition and the collection book “Reburn as Air” (published by Bijutsu Shuppan-sha in 2022).
