NYAB Event - Hiroshi Sugimoto “Still Life”

Hiroshi Sugimoto “Still Life”

The Pace Gallery (510 W 25th St)

This event has ended.

Essential to Sugimoto’s work is the concept of mastery and using available media to create images that resonate long after a viewing. His images are formally composed and rigorously printed, and evidence of the inevitable distortions that accompany the processes of seeing and interpretation.
Sugimoto’s surreal black-and-white photographic renderings of tableaux found in natural history museums play both on and with perceptions of time, space, and reality. Using a large format camera, Sugimoto brings a realistic clarity and exceptional tonality to staged recreations of nature that show no evidence of humankind. While the images appear to be a record of nature, they are artificially constructed representations.

Hiroshi Sugimoto: Still Life includes Polar Bear (1976), his first photograph from the Diorama series, exhibited along with later works from the 1980s, 1990s, and, most recently 2012. Where many of the earlier silver gelatin prints present animals, a number of the 2012 photographs including Mixed Deciduous Forest and Olympic Rain Forest focus on natural landscapes. He has likened the record created by photography to a process of fossilization – the evidence of a moment suspended in time.

Hiroshi Sugimoto (born Tokyo, 1948) studied at St. Paul’s University, Tokyo (1970) and the Art Center College of Design, Los Angeles (1974). He has lived and worked in New York City since 1974.

A conceptual artist who works in many media, Sugimoto was influenced by Minimalism and Conceptual Art and has a lifelong connection to the work and philosophy of Marcel Duchamp. Central to Sugimoto’s work with a camera is the idea that photography is a time machine, a method of preserving and picturing memory and time. This theme provides the defining principle for many of his ongoing series, including Dioramas (1976– ), Theaters (1978– ), and Seascapes (1980– ). He places extraordinary value on the technical aspects of making art. In his photography, Sugimoto prints his work with meticulous attention and a keen understanding of the nuances of silver-print making and its potential for tonal richness in his seemingly infinite palette of blacks, whites, and grays.