About
Hiroshi Sugimoto was born in Tokyo in 1948. In 1970 he moved to Los Angeles and studied photography at the Art Center College of Design. He lives in New York and Tokyo. He 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.
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.
Exhibitions
Museum Exhibitions
Opening this Week
Janus
April 19–November 24, 2024
Palazzo Diedo, Venice
berggruenarts.org
Janus, appropriately titled after the Roman god of beginnings, is the inaugural exhibition at Palazzo Diedo, a new contemporary arts space in Venice established by Berggruen Arts & Culture. For the exhibition, curated by Mario Codognato, eleven international artists—Urs Fischer, Piero Golia, Carsten Höller, Liu We, Ibrahim Mahama, Mariko Mori, Sterling Ruby, Jim Shaw, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Aya Takano, and Lee Ufan—have conceived site-specific interventions in response to the architecture and original features of the eighteenth-century building designed by the acclaimed Venetian architect Andrea Tirali. The Polaroid Foundation has also contributed a special project that invites the participating artists to create an original work using the Polaroid 20×24, the world’s largest instant camera.
Jim Shaw, The Alexander Romances, 2024 (detail) © Jim Shaw. Photo: Jeff McLane
On View
Giacometti / Sugimoto
En scène
Through June 23, 2024
Institut Giacometti, Paris
www.fondation-giacometti.fr
In 2013, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, invited Hiroshi Sugimoto to photograph their sculpture garden. This commission initiated the series Past Presence (2013–18), which includes photographs of Alberto Giacometti’s Tall Figure, III (1960) shot both in broad daylight and at dusk. The duality of these images evokes a connection Sugimoto saw between the sculpture and the supernatural aspects of traditional Japanese Noh theater, where the living and the dead meet on the stage. The exhibition, whose title translates to Staged, is organized around the reconstruction of a Noh scene and includes a selection of Giacometti’s most emblematic sculptures, photographs and films by Sugimoto, and ancient Noh masks from the latter artist’s collection.
Left: Hiroshi Sugimoto, Past Presence 070, Tall Figure III, Alberto Giacometti, 2016 © Hiroshi Sugimoto 2024 and © Succession Alberto Giacometti/ADAGP, Paris 2024. Right: Alberto Giacometti, Homme qui marche I, 1960, Fondation Giacometti © Succession Alberto Giacometti/ADAGP, Paris 2024