From the 11th of October 2023 to the 7th of January 2024, the Hayward Gallery will present Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine, the largest retrospective to date of the internationally renowned artist Hiroshi Sugimoto. Over the past 50 years, Hiroshi Sugimoto has created some of the most alluringly enigmatic photographs of our time: pictures that are precisely crafted and deeply thought-provoking, familiar yet tantalizingly ambiguous. Featuring key works from all of the artist’s major photographic series, this retrospective will highlight the artist’s philosophical yet playful inquiry into our understanding of time and memory and the ambiguous character of photography as a medium suited to both documentation and invention.
The exhibition will also include lesser-known works that illuminate the artist’s interest in the history of photography as well as in mathematics and optical sciences. Often employing a large-format wooden camera, mixing his own darkroom chemicals, and developing his black-and-white prints by hand, Sugimoto has repeatedly re-explored ideas and practices from 19th-century photography, including subjects such as dioramas, wax figures, and architecture. In the process, his work has stretched and rearranged concepts of time, space, and light that are integral to the medium.
Time Machine will commence with a selection of Sugimoto’s black-and-white photographs of natural history dioramas, a series he began in the mid-1970s. The Diorama photos draw attention less to the natural world than to its theatrical representation in museums, whilst at the same time conjuring what the artist has called the ‘fragility of existence’.
The subject of time is also explored in two subsequent bodies of work featured in the exhibition: shot in movie palaces as well as drive-ins, Sugimoto’s Theaters (1976 – ) capture entire films with a single long exposure, thus compressing all the dramatic action that appeared on screen into a single image of radiant whiteness. His renowned Seascapes (1980 -), which depict evenly divided expanses of sea and sky unmarked by any trace of human existence, are equally beguiling in their temporal reference, evoking the immediacy of abstract painting even as they speak to Sugimoto’s interest in focusing on vistas that, as he remarks, “are before human beings and after human beings.”
For Architecture (1997 – ), a series of deliberately out-of-focus studies of iconic modernist buildings – ranging from the Eiffel Tower to the Twin Towers – Sugimoto displays the expansive ambiguity that informs his art, at the same time conveying a sense of the visual germ of an idea in an architect’s imagination, as well as fashioning ghostly images of what he has described as “architecture after the end of the world.” For his subsequent Portraits (1999) series, meanwhile, the artist focused his camera on wax models of famous historical figures from Madame Tussauds; rendered more life-like in black-and-white, figures ranging from Queen Elizabeth to Oscar Wilde and Salvador Dali take on a disarmingly lively appearance, underscoring the camera’s potential for altering our perception. As the artist has noted, “However fake the subject, once photographed, it’s as good as real.”
A final section of Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine will focus on photographs that evoke different notions of timelessness, including his Sea of Buddha (1995) series, which portrays an installation in a 12th-century Kyoto temple featuring 1000 gilded wooden statues of Buddha; and Lightning Fields (2006 – ), spectacular camera-less photographs created by exposing sensitized paper to electrical impulses produced by a Van der Graaf generator. The exhibition will come to a stunning conclusion with a gallery dedicated to Sugimoto’s Opticks (2018 – ), intensely colored photographs of prism-refracted light. Taking inspiration from Newton’s research into the properties of light whilst calling to mind color field painting and artists like Mark Rothko, Opticks presents deeply immersive fields of subtly varying hues
Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine runs from 11th October 2023 to 7th January 2024 at Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road, London SE1 8XX Full price standard: £16 Concessions available & Southbank Centre Members go free
The Hayward Gallery opening times:
Wed – Fri, 10 am – 6 pm
Sat, 10 am – 8 pm
Sun, 10 am – 6 pm
Further information: www.southbankcentre.co.uk
Images, courtesy of the Southbank Centre.
Hiroshi Sugimoto. Photo credit_ Sugimoto Studio / Hiroshi Sugimoto, Mathematical Model 002 Dini’s Surface, 2005/ Hiroshi Sugimoto, UA Playhouse, New York, 1978
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