Curator’s Notes
The works of Japanese artist Hiroshi Sugimoto may be the best way to elucidate the premise of our exhibition. Sugimoto is primarily a photographer who also works in installation and architectural modes. The four photographs in the exhibition are from two of his best-known bodies of work: Theatres and Seascapes. For the Theatres series, started in 1978, Sugimoto found old-fashioned movie palaces in America and set up his large-format camera from the vantage point of the projection booth. Showing a film in an empty theatre, his camera photographs the entire length of the film projected, resulting in a bright white screen surrounded by an opulent interior. For the Seascapes series, begun in 1980, Sugimoto travels the world to take what is in essence the same picture: a square perfectly bisected by sky on the top and sea at the bottom, in varying tones of black and white. These images defy what we normally associate with photography: a recording of reality that is truthful. In both the Theatres and the Seascapes, Sugimoto employs the physicality of the camera and conditions of time to manipulate what we see.

Artist Bio
Through photography, sculpture, architecture and performance, Hiroshi Sugimoto manipulates the inexorable march of time and the vast mysteries of space, stalling the clock in order to create monumental form from historically significant or fleetingly poetic moments. By approaching the artificial with an eye for the natural, in his realistic photographs of museum dioramas or waxworks, and vice versa, in his images of buildings or interiors that seem to melt all that is solid, Sugimoto proves his mastery as one of the world’s greatest artists and innovators of lens-based media. This concept-driven approach begins with the ideation of an image and is only completed upon the work’s execution, usually employing a large-format camera as his primary tool. Sugimoto’s rigorous and scientific approach to subject matter, whether capturing a bolt of electricity directly onto film or splitting light into its constituent colours, characterises his lifelong commitment to experimentation, which has seen the artist creating ambitious sculptural models and public commissions from seemingly impossible mathematical equations. His polymathic practice extends into architecture, through the New Material Research Laboratory he founded in 2008, producing innovative solutions for the future of the built environment using traditional means, methods and craftsmanship. In the following year, Sugimoto founded the Odawara Art Foundation with a similar aim, to further the heritage and appreciation of Japanese performing arts. In 2017 these multiple passions culminated in the Enoura Observatory, a site for performance, reflection and astronomical connection to the cosmos. This is also today the sole location of Sugimoto’s series of Seascape photographs, which captures equal halves of sea and sky above and below the horizon line on New Year’s Day, the only time in the calendar when no boats can be seen on the water.

Hiroshi Sugimoto (b. 1948) lives and works between Tokyo and New York.