Hiroshi Sugimoto: Seascapes

Description

For more than 30 years, Hiroshi Sugimoto has traveled the world photographing its seas, producing an extended meditation on the passage of time and the natural history of the earth reduced to its most basic, primordial substances: water and air. Always capturing the sea at a moment of absolute tranquility, Sugimoto has composed all the photographs identically, with the horizon line precisely bifurcating each image. The repetition of this strict format reveals the uniqueness of each meeting of sea and sky, with the horizon never appearing exactly the same way twice. The photographs are romantic yet absolutely rigorous, apparently universal but exceedingly specific.

Hiroshi Sugimoto has defined what it means to be a multi- disciplined contemporary artist, blurring the lines between photography, painting, installation, and architecture. Preserving and picturing memory and time is a central theme of Sugimoto's photography, including the ongoing series Dioramas , Theaters , and Seascapes . His work is held in numerous public collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; The National Gallery, London; The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; Smithsonian Institute of Art, Washington, D.C., and Tate, London, among others.

...in these unadorned seascapes, there are microworlds of energy evident only on closer inspection...As Edward Weston did with his abstract images of the American West, Sugimoto offers landscape photography that invites a fresh understanding of the genre.--Albert Mobilio "Bookforum "