Hiroshi Sugimoto’s strikingly beautiful works have captivated viewers the world over with their unique concepts and masterful technical command of the photographic medium. In an effort to present the full depth of his artistry, starting from November 2010, the Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art (MIMOCA) is holding an unprecedented yearlong series of four exhibitions by a single artist entitled Hiroshi Sugimoto: The Origins of Art, thematically organized under the headings “Science,” “Architecture,” “History” and “Religion.”
Says Sugimoto, “The time has come for us to look back in order to read the unknowable that lies ahead.”For art to reawaken our powers of imagination and expression, art must retrace its sources and seek out the
very beginnings of consciousness.
This third exhibition entitled “History” includes Sugimoto’s Photogenic Drawings printed from paper negatives created by the inventor of negative-positive photography William Henry Fox Talbot, Stylized Sculpture images of the changing forms of twentieth century fashion in social context and other works of historical inquiry. By examining change via the overwhelming
realism of Sugimoto’s photographs, we hope viewers will give thought to the curiously modern relationship between photo images and history—and further to question Just what is history? How does it figure in the advancement of humankind?