Word: sugimoto
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...world is buying in. Take the success of the whimsically named Super Potato, an interior-design firm founded by Takashi Sugimoto. His designs have been commissioned in more than 20 countries, most notably in the high-end Grand Hyatt and Shangri-La hotel chains. Sugimoto was tired of the proliferation of stale Japanese icons overseas, the lackluster sushi bars or suburban karate studios. He decided, instead, to export a whole new aesthetic that plays with the collision of natural materials, such as bamboo and stone, with industrial matter such as scrap metal or junkyard finds. The result is a celebration...
...weighty themes explored in this exhilarating exhibition, which runs in Tokyo until Jan. 9 before moving to the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. and then to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas. The retrospective spans 30 years, incorporating 104 of Sugimoto's best works, pieces that bring fresh insight to philosophical dualities such as permanence and transience, perception and experience, time and nothingness. While Sugimoto, 57, has been the focus of one-man shows at the Guggenheim in Bilbao and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, this...
...Anything but superficial, Sugimoto relentlessly probes such issues as the difference between what we consider real and fake. In his Diorama series, for example, he turns his attention to those hokey installations at natural-history museums with painted backgrounds and stuffed-animal wildlife scenes or mannequins of Neanderthals hunting. As in Portraits, the dioramas look far more realistic in Sugimoto's presentation than in the museums themselves. Among these delightfully jarring, anachronistic images is a pseudodocumentary photo of Cro-Magnons building a hut. Sugimoto is well aware of the irony that he, like the creators of such dioramas, is practicing...
...series called Theaters, Sugimoto uses movies and movie houses to probe the nature of light and time. Traveling to some of America's finest Beaux Arts and Art Deco theaters, Sugimoto shoots their interiors by keeping his camera lens open during an entire film screening. Burning a complete movie into a single photographic frame leaves every print a glowing, radiant white. These photos are thus not just gorgeous documentation of theater interiors (some of them now demolished) but the screens are encapsulations of two hours of light, motion and experience into one dazzling instant...
...Seascapes, another of Sugimoto's most famous series, are photographs of horizons, where the water meets the sky, taken all over the world, in all types of weather. From afar, they are pure blocks of contrasting shade. Light on top, dark on the bottom (or sometimes, intriguingly, the reverse), they look at first like little more than a homage to Mark Rothko's color-field painting. But up close, each photo is marvelously detailed. Wisps of clouds are clearly defined and individual wave crests reflect the sun at different but interlacing angles. Displayed together so that the horizons all line...