HIROSHI SUGIMOTO – Retrospective of photographer’s work at the de Young Museum, July 7th – September 23rd
29 June 2007Exhibit at Herbst Exhibition Galleries includes major works from 1976 to the present.
San Francisco, June 29th, 2007 — The extraordinary 30-year career of photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto (b. 1948, Japan) is celebrated in this collection of 120 luminous photographs, made from 1976 to the present. This presentation constitutes the first major survey of Sugimoto’s oeuvre and includes such iconic works as Chrysler Building, 1997, and Ligurian Sea, Frumura, 1993.
CHRYSLER BUILDING, 1997 and LIGURIAN SEA, FRUMURA, 1993 – Hiroshi Sugimoto. Courtesy of the artist.
One of Japan’s most important contemporary artists, Sugimoto is known for his ongoing, multiple series of hauntingly beautiful black-and-white photographs, which explore the themes of time, memory, dreams, and natural histories. Working with a large-format camera, his glowing images range from the starkly minimal to the richly detailed, and are often suffused with expanses of light and space.
HIROSHI SUGIMOTO is co-organized by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C., and the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo. The exhibition includes examples of the series that Sugimoto began in the mid-1970s, “Dioramas and Movie Theaters”, which are views of natural history displays and the screens and architecture of cinemas, as well as images from “Seascapes and Portraits”, started in the 1980s and 1990s, respectively. The seven photographs in “Portraits” include images that were taken at Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in London of wax models of Henry VIII and his six wives. Sugimoto painstakingly “remade” them to look like the original paintings from which they were modeled by isolating them from their surroundings in the wax gallery and employing lighting techniques similar to those that the painters might have used. Another photograph, The Music Lesson (1999) further elaborates on the connection between painting and photography. It depicts a wax re-creation of Johannes Vermeer’s painting The Virginal with a Gentleman (The Music Lesson), 1662–1664, which was thought to have been created with the aid of a camera obscura.
HENRY VIII and ANNE BOLEYN, 1999 – Hiroshi Sugimoto. Courtesy of the artist.
Nine works from Sugimoto’s more recent Architecture series are also featured. These blurred, almost dream-like images conjure the moment when an architect’s inspiration begins to coalesce into a vision. In a special tribute to the architects of the new de Young Museum, Sugimoto has included for the San Francisco showing Signal Box–Herzog & de Meuron (1998), a photograph of the copper-clad building in Basel, Switzerland that was a model for the de Young.
THE MUSIC LESSONS – Vermeer (left) and Sugimoto (right)
The show also presents Sea of Buddha, 1995 which is comprised of 48 photographs of 1001 Buddhist sculptures, taken in the 12th-century Sanjusangen-do temple in Kyoto. These images were made under conditions that recreated the splendor of the original Heian period installation, but the serial repetition of the sculptures reminded Sugimoto of certain qualities of 20th-century art, and his photographs link them to aesthetic techniques of 1970s minimalism. Like Sea of Buddha, the series Conceptual Forms, which was begun in 2004, encapsulates the artist’s interest in tangible models as points of entry into spiritual theoretical concepts. The eight photographs in the Conceptual Forms series, Mechanical Forms, 2004 and the three-dimensional piece La Boile en Valise (The Wooden Box), 2004, also pay homage to the influence of Marcel Duchamp on Sugimoto. “Art resides even in things with no artistic intentions,” he has said of these works.
HIROSHI SUGIMOTO. Courtesy of the artist.
Hiroshi Sugimoto has designed each of the four museum installations in the tour of his retrospective. His experiences working with the architectural challenges of curved walls at the signature Bunshaft-designed Hirshhorn Museum inspired his decision to create a curved wall for the installation of ten Seacapes photographs at the de Young Museum. They will be shown in a dramatic space lit by special frame projectors that create window-like vistas onto a seemingly endless sea.
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue titled HIROSHI SUGIMOTO. Published by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C. and the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, in association with Hatje Cantz Publishers. Black-and- white and color illustrations, 338 pages; hardcover $96; paperbound, $35.
To purchase, click here: Museum Stores.
For more information on the de Young and HIROSHI SUGIMOTO: EXHIBITIONS
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San Francisco Sentinel’s Fine Arts Critic Seán Martinfield is a native San Franciscan. He is a Theatre Arts Graduate from San Francisco State University, a professional singer, and well-known private vocal coach to Bay Area actors and singers of all ages and persuasions. His clients have appeared in Broadway National Tours including Wicked, Aïda, Miss Saigon, Rent, Bye Bye Birdie, in theatres and cabarets throughout the Bay Area, and are regularly featured in major City events including Diva Fest, Gay Pride, and Halloween In The Castro. As an Internet consultant in vocal development and audition preparation he has published thousands of responses to those seeking his advice concerning singing techniques, professional and academic auditions, and careers in the Performing Arts. Ask him a question on AllExperts.com . If you would like to build up your vocal performance chops and participate in the Bay Area’s rich theatrical scene, e-mail him at: seanmartinfield@att.net.
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