14th July, 2007 - 6th January, 2008

  
For the past 30 years, Hiroshi Sugimoto (born in 1948) has been producing photographic images that are both fascinating and enigmatic. His images free photography from its obligation to reproduce reality and mobilize it instead for the sake of artistic reflections on time, the ephemeral and memory. “It has been my intention,” explained the artist in 2002, “to use the resources of photography in order to render visible a primordial stage of human memory. Whether individual or cultural memory or the collective memory of humanity as a whole, it is a question of going back in time and recalling where we come from and how we came into existence.” Sugimoto creates extremely reduced memory pictures which explore the nature of photography as well as the fundamental phenomena of human experience.

The work of this Japanese artist, who has lived in the USA since 1970, is serially structured. Yet each individual photograph contains within itself the conceptual space of the respective series as a whole. The ideas of Marcel Duchamp and of American Minimal and Conceptual Art have been as decisive for his art as traditional Japanese culture and far Eastern aesthetics. Sugimoto works with a late-19th-century large-format camera. His recent works, however, have progressively transgressed the medial boundaries of photography, deploying the surrounding space in sculptural and architectural terms.

The exhibition in K20, which launches a tour involving three subsequent venues, is the largest retrospective of this artist’s work in the German-speaking world to date. The exhibition begins in the large hall in the ground floor, where visitors are greeted by a series of 13 large-format images from the Seascapes series, presented on a monumental, gently curved wall segment. The show continues in nine galleries on the two upper floors with the series Theaters and Drive-in Theaters, Portraits, Pine Trees, Colors of Shadow, Conceptual Forms (Mathematical Forms), Dioramas, Architecture, Lightning Fields and Photogenic Drawing. The spatial core of the exhibition is Onduloid, a virtually endless and extensible aluminum stele composed of convex and concave forms.

Sugimoto’s pictures are characterized by their profound stillness and beauty, their tremendous precision and auratic impact. They call for sustained contemplation, for viewers who alternate in a languid rhythm between close-up views of these images, with their abundant detail, and the overall arrangement of the works in space. Sugimoto values photography as a medium of reflection and contemplation. Düsseldorf – a city internationally considered as a center for photographic art – is an appropriate setting for this revealing presentation of Sugimoto’s work, one that provides an ideal opportunity to deepen our appreciation of this major artist.