Hiroshi Sugimoto is one of the best-known photographic artists of our time. His unique accomplishments in his genre contradict the medium’s conventional tasks – to record reality as precisely as possible. In Sugimoto’s work, one is confronted with the formal reduction of conceptual images, in which he addresses fundamental questions of space and time, past and present, art and science, imagination and reality.
 
Sugimoto has given this suite of works – publicly displayed in Munich for the first time – the title « Revolution », but he reveals a radically different understanding of the term in the fifteen large-format works. It is not political or social unrest to which Sugimoto alludes, but rather to the original meaning of the term in the sense of a « suspension » or « overturning » of previously accepted laws or practices through new insights or methods. From a technical perspective, the nature of the work is undeniably photographic. But in terms of how they are perceived and understood, these are pictures that would be more readily ascribed to a painterly or conceptual sphere.
 
The point of departure for the fifteen works entitled « Revolution » is a nocturnal seascape. A 90° clockwise rotation turns the horizons into vertical lines, dissipating the Romantic image of the night. Without changing the pictures’ material substance or subject, any obvious connotations are masked, their certainties denied by the transformation. At the same time, highly original abstract configurations emerge in their place. But it is finally the presence of the aesthetic which Sugimoto so forcefully brings to light in his new work. The process derives from conventional puzzles, but reveals in this case no new narrative moments, leading instead to hermetic compositions reminiscent of the work of American painters such as Barnett Newman.
 
Born and raised in Tokyo, Sugimoto left his home city in 1972 to embark on an art degree in Los Angeles. In 1974 his studies took him to New York, which is where he still lives and works. Sugimoto has not left Japan completely though, and divides his time between New York and Tokyo.
  
The exhibition is accompanied by the book: « Hiroshi Sugimoto: Revolution », featuring texts by Hiroshi Sugimoto and Armin Zweite in German and English, published by Hatje Cantz

Hiroshi Sugimoto - "Revolution"
From October 25th, 2012 to February 10th, 2013
Museum Brandhorst
Theresienstraße 35
80333 München, Germany
089 23805-2286