Hiroshi Sugimoto's Time-Stopping Photography

Hiroshi Sugimoto’s striking gelatin-silver prints explore the nature of time, sensory experience and metaphysics. Born in 1948, the Japanese multidisciplinary artist is influenced by Surrealism, Dadaism and Marcel Duchamp. His career-spanning latest exhibition, Hiroshi Sugimoto B.C., features over twenty works, including images of fossils from Sugimoto’s personal collection. “If a photograph is able to stop time, then a fossil can do the same thing. Both photographs and fossils are records of history,” Sugimoto writes.

Fascinated with the ability of art to blur the line between reality and imagination, Sugimoto’s earliest series, Dioramas, created life-imbued scenes of prehistory, using museum dioramas. Seascapes are meditative abstractions of sea and sky from across the globe, evoking timelessness through the endless horizon. In Praise of Shadows, based on Gerhard Richter’s paintings of burning candles, alludes to the role of fire in “humankind’s ascendancy over other species.” Images from Lightning Fields record the vibrant energy of electrical charges. Sea of Buddha captures the awe inspired by ancient Buddhist sculpture and places of geologically stunning beauty such as Japan’s ancient, mist-shrouded Kegon Waterfall, and the American Southwest’s petroglyph-covered Newspaper Rock.

Hiroshi Sugimoto B.C. is on view through April 25 at Fraenkel Gallery, 49 Geary Street, 4th Floor, San Francisco.

For more information, visit https://fraenkelgallery.com/exhibitions/hiroshi-sugimoto-b-c