Hiroshi Sugimoto
2016
Gelatin-silver print
149.2 x 119.4 cm
Winsing Arts Collection
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Hiroshi Sugimoto
2016
Gelatin-silver print
149.2 x 119.4 cm
Winsing Arts Collection
Are images recalled in precise recollection or as some intangible essence through time? Past Presence explores Hiroshi Sugimoto’s continued interest in time and history through masterworks of the twentieth century.
In 2013, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, invited Sugimoto to participate in a photographic commission for the forthcoming anniversary of The Aldrich Sculpture Garden. While photographing outdoors he encountered a Giacometti sculpture, which became the inspiration for this new body of work. From there, he decided to move out of the garden, turning the lens of the camera indoors and photographing a selection of works in the museum’s interior galleries.
As in his earlier Architecture series, Sugimoto’s images appear out of focus and slightly indistinct, historically familiar, yet challenging the viewer through the blurred renderings to call upon our visual memory, to identify and ascertain each object and what it signifies within our modernity. Evoking questions of how images are remembered, Sugimoto asks us to conjure the original conception and essence of an artwork, removed from its associations.
