Fraenkel Gallery is pleased to return to Paris Photo in the newly-renovated Grand Palais with a special solo presentation of works by Hiroshi Sugimoto surveying the range and depth of the artist’s conceptual practice. The gallery will present two new folding screens in daily alternation along with selections from celebrated series including Theaters, Sea of Buddha, Five Elements, Brush Impression, Seascapes, Opticks, and Past Presence, for which the artist photographed Alberto Giacometti’s celebrated sculptures.
In Past Presence, Sugimoto interprets masterpieces of Modernist sculpture, creating blurred photographs that suggest dreamlike versions of the iconic originals. The recent exhibition Giacometti/Sugimoto: Staged at the Institut Giacometti in Paris paired Sugimoto’s photographs with Giacometti’s sculpture and ancient Noh masks from the artist’s collection.
Kasuga Grand Shrine at Dawn is part of Sugimoto’s recent series of immense folding screens featuring photographs of Japanese landmarks of sacred significance. It depicts the 800-year-old chumon, or middle gate, of Kasuga-Taisha Shinto shrine in the ancient city of Nara. Drawing from a rich history of Japanese art and culture, Sugimoto renders the ancient site using modern photographic techniques in concert with traditional materials. Printed on washi—a historically handmade paper revered since antiquity—the screen evokes the quiet power and enduring presence of traditional Japanese ink paintings.
One of the earliest images from Sugimoto’s iconic series of Theaters, Radio City Music Hall, New York is newly available for the first time. Rather than capturing an extended film projection, the long exposure records the luminous performance of an Easter parade, accompanied by an orchestra. The ghost-like apparitions of the marching figures gather into an altar of light crowned by the Art Deco theater nicknamed the “Showplace of the Nation.”
Sea of Buddha features sculptures from Sanjūsangendō, a 13th century Buddhist shrine located in Kyoto. Sugimoto removed all modern embellishments and contemporary lighting while photographing the temple, presenting the ancient sculptures as they would have been experienced by viewers more than 800 years ago.
Hiroshi Sugimoto has photographed seas and oceans for over forty years, creating the vast Seascapes series. Five Elements is the marriage of these seascapes with Sugimoto’s exploration of mathematical forms and concepts. As he writes, “Whenever I stand on a cliff looking at the sea, I envision an infinite beyond.”
Sugimoto’s exquisite pagodas call back to ancient Buddhist relic towers. The pagoda’s form has evolved in unique sculptural directions, eventually becoming a five-ring structure called gorinto, which utilizes geometry to symbolize the elements. Earth as a cube emphasizes materiality, water is a sphere of clarity, fire is a pyramid imitating pointed flames, and wind is a hemisphere, expressing its power to cut through matter. Finally, the element of emptiness takes the shape of a Japanese hoju, or mystic gem, which disappears into a perfect globe.
Drawn by the allure of the traditional silver-based materials and his interest in the science of photography, in Brush Impression Sugimoto uses a calligraphy brush to paint fixer onto photographic paper, creating one-of-a-kind prints that proudly display the processes of his craft. Each work features kanji symbols, the form of Japanese language based on Chinese pictograms, or hiragana, the phonetic characters used in Japanese. While painting, Sugimoto draws on his study of calligraphy and focuses on the characters and their definitions, bringing traces of the meaning of each word to the qualities of his markings.
The subtle tones of Sugimoto’s gelatin silver printing here register as a seascape enveloped in a mystical light, taken from the shores of the Tasman Sea. Photographed in 2016, the image could be mistaken for a view onto the beginning of time. About his relationship with the ocean, Sugimoto writes, “The sea reminds me that within my blood remain traces of human evolution over hundreds of thousands of years.”
Inspired by the writings and research of Sir Isaac Newton and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe on the science and experience of light, the works in Opticks examine the infinite nature and dual status of color as a physical phenomena and an emotional force. Using Polaroid film, Sugimoto recorded sections of the rainbow spectrum projected into a darkened chamber, paying particular attention to the spaces and gaps between hues. Through Sugimoto’s near-sculptural prism experiments, red is split into infinite reds, and nameless intra-colours are rendered as pure light, moving beyond the seven hues defined by natural science.
