Exhibitions | MAKI Gallery | MAKI

Sakurado Fine Arts is delighted to present Walk With Me To The Sea, Brooklyn based artist Susumu Kamijo’s first exhibition in Japan featuring 25 new works from his iconic poodle series. In these drawings, Kamijo decomposes the poodle’s figure into abstract shapes and restructures them into a playful interlocking arrangement of vibrant colors and textures.

Kamijo, whose interest lies in depicting familiar subjects such as animals and human faces through distortion and abstraction, was walking his girlfriend’s poodle one day when he was drawn to its complex formal quality. Kamijo then began searching for pictures of poodles on the Internet and in dog magazines and created a series of colorful drawings based on these images. Consistently executed in portrait format, each dog poses against a landscape composed with a horizon and a sun-like circle. By employing such a simple composition as a frame, Kamijo takes a rather abstract approach to his subjects and reduces them to a field of colors and shapes in a myriad of variations. The use of oil crayon and pastel, when pressed against paper, creates an uneven, dry and matte texture, evoking a painterly touch in the image. Fused with humor and oddness, Kamijo’s work presents a concise interplay of color and form while imaginatively balancing figuration and abstraction.