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5/18. - 7/7. 2001
   
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Izumi Kato has always taken a woman or a man as the subject matter of his paintings. In his early works the size of head and body is almost the same. His use of unusual colors for depicting these people and their incredibly round faces turn them into tiny animals, growing embryos or unheard of creatures. However, their eye-catching, precocious sexual identity stresses their humanness. If Kato paints a man, in his next picture he paints a woman; and when this is finished, he again paints a man. He says this is primeval logic. Every time two paintings are produced, a couple is born.
At the beginning, Kato only differentiated the figures by means of their sexual organs. From 1999 on, the year he worked on his portrait series "good face", he also began to portray the two genders according to the style and color of their hair. When whole figures were depicted, these also became longer and slimmer, and their proportional head size approached reality. Kato, however, has been consistent in pursuing his concept of faces that are not immediately recognizable as human.
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