An exhibition by Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto will be exhibiting at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in August and September at this year's Edinburgh International Festival.
The exhibition will feature 26 large-scale works, previously not shown outside of Europe, from two of Sugimoto’s most recent, and visually poetic series, Lightning Fields and Photogenic Drawings.
Lightning Fields is a series of dramatic photographs produced through the play of violent electrical discharges on photographic film. Sugimoto moved his studio six times in an attempt to overcome a problem of static electricity which would often ruin his photographs with their tell-tale white flashes on the finished image. He decided to investigate further the phenomenon and to make ‘an ally of my nemesis’.
Eventually, rather than try to suppress the random acts of nature, Sugimoto found ways to generate them by using a Van de Graaf Generator to induce electrical charges on the film. His large photographs expose in minute detail the remarkable effects of light particles not visible to the human eye. The results offer a fascinating range of interpretations, from powerful lightning strikes to images of weird and wonderful life forms.
The Photogenic Drawings series was inspired by the innovative techniques of the 19th century photographer, Henry Fox Talbot. This pioneering artist invented ‘photogenic drawings’ by using light-sensitive paper to produce a negative in the early experimental days of photography.
This process was especially influential in Scotland shaping the careers of Robert Adamson and David Octavius Hill, who went on to become one of the most famous collaborations in photographic history.
Sugimoto has spent several years locating and acquiring Fox Talbot’s rare and vulnerable negatives from which to make his own photographs. The small scale of Fox Talbot’s work has been greatly enlarged by Sugimoto to reveal images that are haunting, almost painterly in their evocative power.
Simon Groom, Director of Modern and Contemporary Art, National Galleries of Scotland said that Sugimoto's new series demonstrates "a master at the very top of his game".
“Sugimoto has developed an international reputation for the sheer beauty of his images, which are as thought-provoking as they are technically stunning,“ he said.
The exhibition of the Japanese artist's work is part of Festival 2011’s exploration of contemporary and classical Asian artists and their long influence on artists in the West.
It will be complemented by Towards the Light, a free display of prints from the National Galleries of Scotland collection that will examine the influence of 19th century Japanese colour woodcuts on artists working in Britain and Japan during the first decades of the 20th century. 19th century Japanese prints will feature as well as prints by artists using traditional colour woodcut techniques in the 1920s and 30s.
The Hiroshi Sugimoto exhibition will run from 4th August until 25 September. Admission will be £7/£5 (concessions).
Hiroshi Sugimoto biography
Hiroshi Sugimoto was born in Tokyo in 1948 and now divides his time between Japan and his studio in New York. He has exhibited extensively in major museums and galleries throughout the world, including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles; the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin; the Serpentine Gallery, London; and the Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain, Paris.
In 2009 he was awarded the Praemium Imperiale, an arts prize awarded by the imperial family of Japan on behalf of the Japan Art Association. His image, Boden Sea, Uttwil (1993) featured on the cover of No Line on the Horizon, the 2009 album by Irish rock band U2.