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Hiroshi Sugimoto

Joe

September 9–October 14, 2006
Beverly Hills

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Joe: 2029, 2005–06 Gelatin silver print, 59 × 47 ½ inches (149.9 × 120.6 cm), edition of 5

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Joe: 2029, 2005–06

Gelatin silver print, 59 × 47 ½ inches (149.9 × 120.6 cm), edition of 5

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Joe: 2055, 2005–06 Gelatin silver print, 59 × 47 ½ inches (149.9 × 120.6 cm), edition of 5

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Joe: 2055, 2005–06

Gelatin silver print, 59 × 47 ½ inches (149.9 × 120.6 cm), edition of 5

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Joe: 2065, 2005–06 Gelatin silver print, 59 × 47 ½ inches (149.9 × 120.6 cm), edition of 5

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Joe: 2065, 2005–06

Gelatin silver print, 59 × 47 ½ inches (149.9 × 120.6 cm), edition of 5

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Joe: 2076, 2005–06 Gelatin silver print, 59 × 47 ½ inches (149.9 × 120.6 cm), edition of 5

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Joe: 2076, 2005–06

Gelatin silver print, 59 × 47 ½ inches (149.9 × 120.6 cm), edition of 5

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Joe: 2088, 2005–06 Gelatin silver print, 59 × 47 ½ inches (149.9 × 120.6 cm), edition of 5

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Joe: 2088, 2005–06

Gelatin silver print, 59 × 47 ½ inches (149.9 × 120.6 cm), edition of 5

About

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to announce Hiroshi Sugimoto's Joe.

"I photographed Joe employing the same approach as my architectural series. A finished building is a product of negotiation; I used an out-of-focus technique in an effort to regain a sense of the architect's core idealist vision for the building. But, as a sculptor Serra does not have to compromise like an architect; Joe is his idealized vision. Thus the sculpture is a representation of pure form for us both." (Hiroshi Sugimoto)

Hiroshi Sugimoto is best known for his highly stylized photographic series of seascapes, movie theaters, natural history dioramas, waxworks and Buddhist sculptures. These series provoke fundamental questions about the relationship of photography and time, as well as exploring the mysterious and ineffable nature of reality. Joe is a series of black and white photographs that Sugimoto made of Richard Serra's sculpture at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in St. Louis.

In recent years, Sugimoto's work has become increasingly concrete at the same time as it has become notably more abstract. It has broken out of, or beyond, photographic illusion to touch the moment of an ideal space rendered in photography. In his Architecture series (1997-2002), rather than photographing key modernist buildings to elucidate their lines and volumes, Sugimoto blurred the image in an effort to capture not the buildings themselves but mental images of them. Similarly, using areas of soft light and dark, he has created fragmentary images of Richard Serra's sculpture Joe that function more like passages of visual memory than empirical recordings. Like a work of architecture, Serra's sculpture has to be experienced by walking around and through it. Permanently installed outdoors, it changes according to the time of day, the weather and the viewer's relation to it. Thus Sugimoto's photographs of Joe are parallel creations to the sculpture itself.

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