Kumi Sugai began developing his Festival series in the 1970s, creating sign-like motifs reminiscent of traffic signals and road signs through simplified forms and bold colors that could be recognized even from a distance. In this series, which includes this work, the pictorial language of the Autoroute series was further reduced into symbols, pursuing a form of painting that functioned within society much like public signage. Compositions consisting of circles enclosed within squares and connected by diagonal lines are repeated in various combinations, producing works that are both mechanical and rhythmic. When viewed alongside the Porsche that Sugai drove, this work can be seen not only as a sign-like image but also as an evocation of an automobile’s structural framework.
In 1983, the first retrospective exhibition of Sugai’s work in Japan, Kumi Sugai: Painting in Motion, Beyond Clarity, was held at the Seibu Museum of Art and subsequently toured to the Otsu Seibu Hall and the Ohara Museum of Art. Festival M.T. (1975), from the collection of the Takanawa Museum of Art, was included in the exhibition. Following this retrospective, La Vacance de I’Eté (1965) was newly acquired by our museum.