Hiroshi Sugimoto

Grande Femme III SOLD CHF 40’000.00

L’homme qui Marche II SOLD CHF 80’000.00

White Curves  SOLD CHF 45’000.00

Mlle. Pogany II SOLD CHF 15’000.00

Big Bird SOLD CHF 15’000.00

The Big Ear SOLD CHF 15’000.00

Since the 1970s, Hiroshi Sugimoto (b. 1948 in Tokyo, lives in New York) has been working with a large-format camera, long exposure times, and exclusively in black and white. Influenced by American minimalism and conceptual art, and interested in fundamental phenomena such as space and time, their transience and our memory, he has been addressing himself for decades with recurrent themes. His enigmatic photographs show dioramas in natural history museums, tableaux from wax museums, empty movie theaters with glowing white screens, ocean horizons in fog, and icons of modern architecture. In the six photographs of the series Past Presence, we encounter the fleeting moment of looking at art. Sugimoto photographed masterworks of modernism in international museum collections, including the Fondation Beyeler. A hazy blur softens the sharp edges and details of the sculptures by Brancusi, Calder, Giacometti, and Kelly. Shapes and proportions become the focus-as in shadow pictures. Sugimoto's pictures lend the objects an atmospherically transported appearance, and broaden photography's inherent dictum that it faithfully reproduces reality. * The six photographs are here offered for joint purchase as one lot, during the live auction at the Fondation Beyeler attendees will also have the opportunity to bid individually on each photograph, to purchase one or more them as separate lots. The works will either be sold singularly, or jointly dependant on which bid offer achieves the highest total price for the works.