KATSURA YUKI

• KATSURA YUKI was an avant-garde artist who developed a diverse practice spanning painting, collage, and three-dimensional works from the prewar period through the postwar era. In 1935, she held her first solo exhibition of collages, incorporating everyday materials such as leaves, cloth, lace, and cork into her compositions while exploring the distinctive forms and textures inherent in the materials themselves. As early as the 1930s, she also created works incorporating small three-dimensional forms made of plywood and cork, and her experiments with introducing the materials themselves into the picture plane gradually developed into three-dimensional works. Building on this sustained interest in materials, Katsura boldly rearranged everyday objects and forms, developing a distinctive artistic world characterized by humor and allegory. In the present work, she takes the kappa, a figure from Japanese folklore, as her subject, boldly simplifying and transforming its characteristic head, facial features, and body to create a distinctive form that combines familiarity with strangeness.