Harue Koga

Sea is Harue Koga’s most famous painting, and an example of one of the first Surrealist works by an artist in Japan. Painted in a photomontage style, Koga used images from magazines, postcards and newspapers, re-sizing and painting them with meticulous precision on a large canvas. The woman in the bathing suit is said to be painted from an image of Gloria Swanson, the American film actress.

60 x 80 cm is the largest print size option we are able to offer for this artwork.

• Artist Harue Koga
• Artwork Sea
• Exhibition Surrealism Beyond Borders
• Material FSC Certified paper and wood
• Date of work 1929
• Credit Original: Sea, 1929 Oil on canvas130 × 162.5cmThe National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo

Harue Koga (1895 – 1933) was a Japanese painter. Associated with the avant-garde and Surrealism movements, he is considered a key figure in the Japanese surrealist movement. Upon his move to Tokyo to study art, he enrolled at the Pacific Art Society Institute, a university that specialised in Western style art, and became studied at the Institute of the Japanese Watercolour Society, which he retained close ties with for the rest of his career. Together with Matsuda Teisho, Koga founded the Raimoku Western-style Painting Society in his home-town of Kurume, and later co-founded the Japanese avant-garde art group ‘Action’, whose aims were to create art freely without the potential limitations of existing artistic movement. His own practice combined elements of Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism and painted collage, often accompanying his works with his own avant-garde poetry.

• Product Code S22291