 North Pacific Ocean, Okuros, 2002 seven parts, silver gelatin print, 152 x 1078 cm Hiroshi Sugimoto North Pacific Ocean, Okuros, 2002 Hiroshi Sugimoto has made black and white photographs throughout his career. He has received world-wide acclaim for his photographic works which have a rigorous conceptual approach that renders his unique vision of the world in abstract and infinite ways. He is best known for his works in series such as the "Seascape" - and the "Theatre" series. Since 1980, Hiroshi Sugimoto has travelled to remote seaside cliffs around the world to make meditative, minimal images of seascapes. Avoiding dramatic weather and human incident, he focused instead on the meeting of sea and sky. In each photograph Sugimoto positioned the camera in such a way that the horizon divides the frame into two sections of equal size - sky and ocean. This featureless, iconic definition of his subject leads the viewer to attend to the delicately elusive qualities of windswept water, shredding mists, and luminous haze... or, like in the seven part panorama "North Pacific Ocean, Okuros", to a block-like precision and clarity of the two halves - black sea, pale grey sky. Shorn of any distracting details, the panorama looks more like an abstract painting than a photograph. Sugimoto makes no attempt to hide the vertical divisions of the seven parts. Strangely, though, they fail to interrupt the wide-screen continuity uniting the entire piece. Nothing can be seen here, apart from an immense emptiness. Stillness is all, and it becomes very silencing. The viewer seems to be engulfed in a primordial world, unchanged for countless millennia. Similar to Caspar David Friedrich's paintings, the Seascapes do not only represent Nature, "but are intended to be very religious". In Sugimoto's view, the sea is "an early example of human naming something outside the world inside himself". What he ultimately captures on film seems to be more than the mere physics of appearance: rather, it resembles the shadow pictures stored in our memories. Hiroshi Sugimoto has held solo exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Moderna Museet, Stockholm. In 2001, he was awarded the Hasselblad Foundation Prize. His work is collected by the Tate Gallery, London; The Metropolitain Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. Exhibition: February 24 - March 19, 2005 Gallery hours: Tue-Sat 12 - 6 pm Xavier Hufkens Gallery Sint-Jorisstraat 6-8 Rue Saint-Georges B-1050 Brussels Telefon +32 2 639 67 30 Fax +32 2 639 67 38 Email info@xavierhufkens.com www.xavierhufkens.com |
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