Hiroshi Sugimoto: End of Time

The Mori Art Museum is proud to present “Hiroshi Sugimoto: End of Time,” the first major retrospective of one of Japan’s most important contemporary artists. The exhibition represents the first chance to survey, in significant volume, Hiroshi Sugimoto’s whole photographic work, made from the 1970s until the present, including the series of Dioramas, Seascapes, Theatres, Portraits, Architecture, Sea of Buddha and Conceptual Forms. In addition, there will be a chance to see the artist’s most recent experiments: fusions of photography with architecture and traditional Noh theatre. Colors of Shadow, a new series of color photographs of the artist’s studio, which he designed himself, will also have its world premiere. The exhibition is designed by Sugimoto, and will include a functioning Noh theatre, on which a number of special events, including a Noh play (produced by the artist), will be held. Other works exhibited for the first time include new photographs from the Conceptual Forms series, and two new sculptures made by the artist based on the models from which the photographs in that series were made.

After showing in Tokyo the exhibition will tour to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. and The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas.

Mori Art Museum Director David Elliott comments:

Hiroshi Sugimoto is one of the most important artists working anywhere in the world today. Rather than making photographs as a record of detail or circumstance, he has used this medium to test the nature of reality itself. His extensive series of works question the parameters of history, nature, time, culture and belief. In the process of doing this he leads us towards a more acute appreciation of both the possibilities and limits of perception and understanding.

Hiroshi Sugimoto: End of Time

Hiroshi Sugimoto has, over the past twenty-five years, become established as a leading photographer and conceptual artist on the international scene through series of photographs that concentrate systematically on different subjects. Until now there has been no opportunity to look at his development within a larger context and this, his first retrospective exhibition, concentrates on the whole of his work as well as on his challenging and ambivalent ideas about the photograph as a means of representing the elusive yet fundamental ways in which we perceive the world.

It is not easy to pigeonhole Sugimoto’s work because it extends far beyond the boundaries of photography to include objects, architecture and exhibition design - forms of expression, like the photograph, that he uses to highlight and expand the perception of such abstract qualities as time, light, space, movement, spirit - even the nature of reality itself.

The early works in the exhibition come from a series of photographs of the interiors of darkened cinema theatres in which the main subject is not the architecture of the place itself, although this is often distinguished by its stylishness, but the large seemingly blank white screen. These works, twenty-one of which are exhibited here, are in fact as much portraits of time as place in that the exposure of the negative coincides exactly with the length of the film that was running when it was made. The film illuminates the room around it but, because it is in constant motion, individual detail is lost in the photograph in which only white light remains on the screen.

Sugimoto has said that the photograph is like a blank screen upon which the observer can project his or her impressions and desires but it is also a more assertive expression of the artist’s own sensibility and ideas. This can be clearly seen in the series of seascapes, taken according to the same format in different parts of the world. But because the subject is the sea there are no natural features to distinguish changing location, only different times of day or night, the weather conditions, available light and waves. Although they seem similar, in fact these works vary immensely. When looked at carefully they become more objects for meditation and awe than screens for self-projection. Their monumental and sublime impact is derived from their size and subtle, “painterly” detail as well as their lack of scale and contextualizing detail. In a sense these works are portraits of different faces of infinity. Twenty of the Seascape photographs are included in the exhibition.

The artist confronts time in a different way in his series of photographs of museum dioramas – quaintly old-fashioned stage settings in which artists and designers dramatically presented wild or exotic scenes. To these simulations of what often now would be regarded as dubious interpretations of pre-history or nature, Sugimoto adds a further layer. The large black and white images shown here endow these period pieces with a timeless contemporary life that, cumulatively, become melancholy reflections on the changing nature of history, human endeavor, knowledge and understanding. Ten of these photographs are shown here in large scale format.

In Tokyo the exhibition begins with his most recent works: fifteen photographs from the series of Conceptual Forms – images of early twentieth century plaster models made to illustrate different mathematical equations and of machines that elucidate various principals in Physics. Here Sugimoto invokes the laconic yet mystical art machines of Marcel Duchamp that echo multiple relationships in the universe, life, sex and nature. He has also added to these ideal structures some conceptual forms made by himself: a multiple of the Large Glass based on a version of Duchamp’s masterpiece at Tokyo University as well as three dimensional aluminum models based on mathematical equations. The layout of the exhibition in Tokyo is specially designed by the artist to stress unity of approach in spite of different subject matter. It ends in a series of dramatic, large scale, slightly blurred images of iconic buildings from the history of modern architecture. In this meditation on power, recent history and modernity, the fragile beauty of human achievement is both questioned and celebrated.

The exhibition is co-organized by the Mori Art Museum with the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and will open in Tokyo on 17 September 2005. It will then move to Washington, D.C. in February 2006 and The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, thereafter. David Elliott, Director of the Mori Museum and Kerry Brougher, Director of Art and Programs and Chief Curator at the Hirshhorn are the co-curators of the exhibition, which will feature over 140 photographs ranging from 1976 to the present that encompass the entirety of this artist’s nearly thirty-year career.

A fully illustrated 368-page catalogue in English and Japanese editions will be published to coincide with the exhibition. Essays have been contributed by David Elliott and Kerry Brougher as well as notes on the work and an autobiographical essay by the artist. Published by Hatje Cantz, Germany [English edition] and the Mori Art Museum [Japanese edition]. In addition Hatje Cantz Publishers will issue a collector’s edition of the catalog in collaboration with the artist, including an original work of art with a deluxe bound copy of the book in a specially manufactured aluminum case.

Hiroshi Sugimoto: End of Time
Organisation: Mori Art Museum, Tokyo
Kooperation: Hirshhorn Museum, Washington
Kurator: David Elliott

Stationen:
17.09.05 - 09.01.06 Mori Art Museum, Tokyo
16.02.06 - 14.05.06 Hirshhorn Museum, Washington
17.09.06 - 21.01.07 Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth