Hiroshi Sugimoto | Architecture	postmedia.net
The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago February 22 - June 1, 2003     Sugimoto: Architecture Hiroshi Sugimoto: Architecture is accompanied by a beautiful catalogue with full-page illustrations and essays by Francesco Bonami, John Yau, and Marco Di Michelis. After the exhibition concludes at the MCA on June 2, 2003, it will travel to the Williamson Gallery at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, from November 15, 2003, to February 8, 2004. The Architecture of Time	Profoundly beautiful and powerfully evocative, the new body of work Architecture by internationally-acclaimed Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto will be presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Chicago, on February 22, 2003. This series of breathtaking black-and-white photographs dissolves the lines between time, memory, and history in icons of modernist architecture that include the Eiffel Tower, the Guggenheim Bilbao, and Corbusier's Notre-Dame-du-Haut in Ronchamp. Sugimoto was first commissioned to photograph great works of architecture in 1997 for the MCA exhibition At the End of the Century: One Hundred Years of Architecture (1999). The Hiroshi Sugimoto: Architecture exhibition represents the first time the series will be shown together. Manilow Senior Curator Francesco Bonami explains the conceptual nature of the work, "Sugimoto has two recurring obsessions: history and time. He once described this work as 'architecture after the end of the world,' which is interesting when you consider how he uses time – in long exposures -- to literally blur reality and question architecture and its history." Hiroshi Sugimoto is known for taking years to work through a series of long-exposure works on themes ranging from museum dioramas, movie theaters, seascapes, and historical wax figures. The new architectural series runs counter to the traditional sense of a photograph as capturing a moment in time. By sometimes leaving the lens open for hours Sugimoto captures the essence, rather than the specifics, of his subject. The architectural icons in his most recent series Hiroshi Sugimoto: Architecture represent the fifth major theme that Sugimoto has explored in depth. With this series, Sugimoto has essentially broken all the rules of architectural photography. Photographing great landmarks of modernist architecture around the world, Sugimoto has deliberately taken the images out of focus and at unusual angles, isolating the recognizable forms. The blurred forms evoke the passage of time, muting the architectural details and leaving the essence of the building; suggestive of the way in which our memories preserve images.
Hiroshi Sugimoto born 1948 in Tokyo. lives in Tokyo and New York. postmedia.net