Hiroshi Sugimoto: Architecture
Museum of Contemporary art - MCA, Chicago
February 22 - June 2, 2003
Profoundly beautiful and powerfully evocative, the new body of work Architecture by internationally-acclaimed Japanese photographer HIROSHI SUGIMOTO is presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Chicago. This series of breathtaking black-and-white photographs dissolves the lines between time, memory, and history in icons of modernist architecture that include the Eiffel Tower, the Guggenheim Bilbao, and Corbusier's Notre-Dame-du-Haut in Ronchamp.
Hiroshi Sugimoto was first commissioned to photograph great works of architecture in 1997 for the MCA exhibition At the End of the Century: One Hundred Years of Architecture (1999). The Hiroshi Sugimoto: Architecture exhibition represents the first time the series are shown together. Manilow Senior Curator Francesco Bonami explains the conceptual nature of the work, "Sugimoto has two recurring obsessions: history and time. He once described this work as 'architecture after the end of the world,' which is interesting when you consider how he uses time – in long exposures -- to literally blur reality and question architecture and its history."
Hiroshi Sugimoto is known for taking years to work through a series of long-exposure works on themes ranging from museum dioramas, movie theaters, seascapes, and historical wax figures. The new architectural series runs counter to the traditional sense of a photograph as capturing a moment in time. By sometimes leaving the lens open for hours Hiroshi Sugimoto captures the essence, rather than the specifics, of his subject.
Hiroshi Sugimoto established his reputation for working in series in 1976 with a group of photographs of natural history museum dioramas that questioned what is real and what is reconstructed. For his following series, Hiroshi Sugimoto chose the interior of movie theaters built in the 1920s and 1930s. By using a time exposure the length of the film, the result was an illuminated but blank white rectangle that paid homage to the Minimalists.
His series of seascapes occupied him for over 20 years. Taken primarily at night, they exhibit a more spiritual relationship to time. Divided into simply "water and air," the seascapes inspire a zen-like sense of contemplation and timelessness with their sublime transitions between sea and sky. The seascapes were followed by a series of photographs of life-size historical figures in wax museums. These frozen portraits have a distinct sense of artificiality, reinforced by the varied time periods being brought together in one space.
The architectural icons in his most recent series Hiroshi Sugimoto: Architecture represent the fifth major theme that Sugimoto has explored in depth. With this series, Hiroshi Sugimoto has essentially broken all the rules of architectural photography. Photographing great landmarks of modernist architecture around the world, Hiroshi Sugimoto has deliberately taken the images out of focus and at unusual angles, isolating the recognizable forms. The blurred forms evoke the passage of time, muting the architectural details and leaving the essence of the building; suggestive of the way in which our memories preserve images.
The unique installation at the MCA parallels the architectural space of the work. Each of the 30 five by six foot photographs is mounted on a dark gray monolithic wall (15 in each gallery space) with the photographs faced away from the entrance so the viewer must experience the entire space before encountering the actual work.
Hiroshi Sugimoto: Architecture is accompanied by a beautiful catalogue with full-page illustrations and essays by Francesco Bonami, John Yau, and Marco Di Michelis.
After the exhibition concludes at the MCA, it will travel to the Williamson Gallery at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, from November 15, 2003, to February 8, 2004.
MCA - MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, CHICAGO
220 East Chicago Avenue, Chicago, IL 60611
