ART CITIES:Brussels-Hiroshi Sugimoto

A multidisciplinary artist, Hiroshi Sugimoto works with photography, sculpture, architecture and installation. A photographer since the ‘70s, his work deals with history and temporal existence by investigating themes of time, empiricism, and metaphysics. Sugimoto has reinterpreted the classic tradition of photography, bringing a conceptual element to genres such as still life, abstract photography, portraiture and photography of the natural world.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium

In Hiroshi Sugimoto’s solo exhibition “Still Life”, 40 photographs are displayed in two rooms of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium. These works interact with works of ancient art that are displayed nearby. Sugimoto’s work is reminiscent of that of the Flemish primitives with whom they share many characteristics such as richness in details and depths, surprising light effects or thoughts on nature. Hiroshi Sugimoto was born in 1948 in Tokyo. He took his earliest photographs in high school, photographing film footage of Audrey Hepburn as it played in a movie theater. After receiving a BA from Saint Paul’s University in Tokyo in 1970, he traveled west, first encountering communist countries such as the Soviet Union and Poland, and later Western Europe. In 1971, he visited Los Angeles and decided to stay, receiving a BFA from the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles in 1972. In 1974, he moved to New York. In 1976 he visited the city’s American Museum of Natural History for the first time and he was intrigued by the lifelike qualities of the dioramas of animals and people. These provided the subject matter for the first of his “Dioramas” series, which, along with the “Seascapes” and “Theaters” series (were conceived between 1976 and 1977 and have continued through the present. He has since developed other ongoing series, including photographs of waxwork-museum figures, drive-in theaters, and Buddhist sculptures, all of which similarly blur distinctions between the real and the fictive. “In Praise of Shadows” (1998) is a series of photographs based on Gerhard Richter’s paintings of burning candles. In 1999, he made “Portraits”, this series is supported by the analogous idea of dioramas. Sugimoto, in this series took pictures of Henry VIII and his wives’ wax figures. His focus was in London on Madame Tussaud’s creations as well as a museum of wax in the Itō, Japan. His “Architecture” series (2000-03) consists of blurred images of well-known examples of Modernist architecture. In 2004, Sugimoto began to photograph Richard Serra’s torqued spiral sculpture “Joe”, exploring its dynamic viewpoints and dramatic manipulations of light and shadow. The series “Conceptual Forms” (also 2004) takes up the subject of Industrial Revolution-era mechanical models used to demonstrate the movements of the rapidly advancing machines of the day. Favoring black-and-white, Sugimoto has continued to use the same camera, a turn-of-the-century box camera, throughout his career. His series “Mathematical Models” (2005-15), are photos of objects representing a mathematical equation, the photographs are usually displayed alongside the model, though each object is an independent work of art itself. In order to create the objects, Sugimoto input equations into a computer in order to map the physical sculpture before producing it. This series springs from Sugimoto’s interest in the history of science and his ongoing questions on the nature of representation.

Info: Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Rue de la Régence-Regentschapsstraat 3, Brussels, Duration 20/4-19/8/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-17:00, Sat-Sun 11:00-18:00, www.fine-arts-museum.be