Galerie Frank Elbaz now represents Japanese-American artist Kunié Sugiura, in collaboration with Taka Ishii Gallery. The gallery will present Sugiura's 1979 work *Christmas lights* from her Photopainting series at Art Basel in June, ahead of her first solo exhibition in Paris opening on October 19. Sugiura, born in Nagoya in 1942, moved to the US in 1963, earned her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1967, and later settled in New York. She received the Higashikawa Prize in 2007. In 2025, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art mounted her first US survey exhibition, with a parallel show at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University. Her works are held in the collections of MoMA, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and the Denver Art Museum.
This representation matters because it brings renewed institutional and market attention to Sugiura, a historically significant artist whose Photopainting series bridges photography and painting. The collaboration between a Paris-based gallery and a Tokyo-based gallery underscores the growing international interest in postwar Japanese and Japanese-American artists. Sugiura's recent survey at SFMOMA and her upcoming solo show in Paris signal a broader reassessment of her contributions to contemporary art, potentially influencing both curatorial narratives and the secondary market for her work.