?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 10,000 - $ 15,000
HIROSHI SUGIMOTO (1948- ) Portfolio entitled Time Exposed. With 50 plates, plus the frontispiece of Sugimoto's installation in the IBM Courtyard in Tokyo. Tri-tone offset lithographs, the images each measuring 9 3/8x12 1/8 inches (23.8x30.8 cm.), tipped to the mounts 14x18 1/4 inches (35.6x46.4 cm.), each with the letterpress debossed title, date, and plate number on mount recto. Folio-sized brushed aluminum portfolio case; with the colophon pages which give the edition of 500; and with the printed card slipcase, lightly soiled; contents loose as issued. FROM AN EDITION OF 500, WITH SUGIMOTO'S SIGNATURE, IN PENCIL. Tokyo, Japan: Kyoto Shoin Co., Ltd., 1991
Acquired by a Private New York Collector in the early 1990s.
Hiroshi Sugimoto's sublime studies of seascapes are meditational, grand, and elusive. The horizon lines--some defined, some a hazy diffusion into the sky--are placed at the same plane in each image, creating a sense of seamless, transcendent sameness. Although the locations are debossed in the white mounts below each image (underlining Sugimoto's technical exactness), they are largely interchangeable. The photographs, made with a large-format camera and using a long exposure, are both meant to capture the passage of time and, it seems, to create a sense of timelessness and placelessness.
Many of Sugimoto's projects have used extended time as a component of the creation of the images, and his series are by extension a philosophical consideration of mortality. They document the world as it is (in this case the essential and life-giving resources water and air), but also reveal something of how the world feels without us, the viewer. Sugimoto said, "To me photography functions as a fossilization of time." In apparent opposition to our concept of photography as a record of a moment, Sugimoto's statement implies that the medium has the potential to also serve as a record of what is no longer present.
