Galería Javier López is pleased to announce the opening next Tuesday, 2nd of June, of the solo exhibit by Japanese artist, Hiroshi Sugimoto.
Hiroshi Sugimoto was born and raised in Tokyo, Japan, in 1948. In the early seventies he changed the course of his career and enrolled at Art Centre College of Design, Los Angeles where he retrained as an artist. There he absorbed the tenets of Conceptualism and Minimalism choosing the medium of photography. Upon his graduation in 1974, he moved to New York City where he is based today. It is here where he develops his innovative work that is divided into series. He initially developed his work according to two subject matters: ‘Dioramas’, a series in which he photographed displays in the Natural History Museum and ‘Theaters’, a series that involved shooting old American movie palaces. Galería Javier López currently presents a selection of his latest series, ‘Seascapes’.
Sugimoto has explored remote beaches and cliffed coasts all over the world in order to take these hypnotizing minimalist photographs of marine seascapes (“Day Seascapes”). Untouched by human encroachment or dashing weather, Sugimoto’s photographs are about the sea and its horizon. These characteristics push the viewer to explore the delicate and almost elusive features of windswept water, ever-changing mist, and site-specific luminous fog. Embracing the world, touched by countless atmospheres, the horizon appears and disappears.
In his series of night exposure seascapes (“Night Seascapes”), Sugimoto encourages the viewer’s perceptive ability to detect subtle polar differences. Whilst the viewer’s eyes adapt to darkness, he becomes gradually aware of the fact that the black photographs are not merely empty spaces. On the contrary, they are captured on the limits of the threshold of vision and thus depict waves and star lights. When contemplating the horizon line one may perceive the limits of the world, extracting a deep sense of the sublime.
The serial construction and the subject’s consistency of his work encourage viewers to discern the existing subtle differences between the images, and further invite to distinguish the most fine perceptive distinctions. With close examination, weighing, and comparing the most insignificant particular increases between the prints, the viewer gradually becomes conscious of his own thinking process and further becomes aware that what at first he assumed to be transparent and objective embeds in reality nothing less than the essence of subjectivity. If the viewer continues to observe for a longer period of time, he will notice that his conscience seems to dissolve as he losses himself in the utmost sensitivity of the slow movement of pure vision.
Galería Javier López presents a selection of “Seascapes” of exactly the same size, in which the subtle variations become almost imperceptible. Parallel to this exhibition at Galería Javier López, Fundación La Caixa organized a retrospective that compliments the current show.
