Berliner Salon: Gallery Weekend Arrives
The 1st of May is a national holiday in Berlin, when businesses close and the streets fill with music, dancing, social demonstrations, and, finally, riots. Today, however, May 2nd, marks another annual event in town, in an ironic follow-up to yesterday’s May Day festivities, which are more or less identified with the political agendas of the communist and anarchist parties active in Berlin. Instead, May 2nd-4th will celebrate international commerce and capitalism. Oh, and art. It’s gallery weekend.
34 of Berlin’s most influential galleries will host openings this weekend, with countless others opening independently of the official event as well. Almost every cultural venue in Berlin has strategically scheduled their exhibitions to coincide this weekend and take full advantage of the out-of-town collectors, curators and gallerists who will descend on the city in droves, traipsing across town from one private view to another and tripping over the broken bottles and remaining detritus still littering the streets from yesterday’s riots.
It would be impossible to cover every opening of merit occurring this weekend, but one particular exhibition deserves recognition, namely Nobuyoshi Araki’s first solo exhibition in Berlin. Tonight, Jablonka Galerie will open Kinbaku, which features 100 black and white photographs by one of Japan’s most notorious contemporary artists. Although this exhibition will be Araki’s first in Berlin, his work was recently shown in Germany alongside Season 3 artist Hiroshi Sugimoto and Ryuji Miyamoto at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsberg. Araki’s photographs predominately depict women bound in rope, which the artist explains in the press release as “a contrast to the Western concept of Bondage: ‘Kinbaku (knots with ropes) are different from bondage. I only tie up a woman’s body because I know I cannot tie up her heart. Only her physical parts can be tied up. Tying up a woman becomes an embrace.’” It seems a bit odd that Araki’s work is only now being exhibited on this scale in Berlin, a city known for its liberal, if not encouraging, attitudes towards fetish and BDSM subcultures, but, as the adage goes, better late than never. Schoenes Galerie Wochenende.
Photography on Photography at The Met
Last September, the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened a new gallery on the second floor dedicated exclusively to contemporary photographs. The second exhibition in this space, Photography on Photography: Reflections on the Medium Since 1960, opens to the public today.
This exhibition, organized by Doug Eklund, Assistant Curator in the Met’s Department of Photographs, includes Hiroshi Sugimoto (Season 3), Sherrie Levine, Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe, Richard Prince, Thomas Ruff, Vito Acconci, Kota Ezawa, Moyra Davey, Mary Wyse, and others. Malcolm Daniel, Curator in charge of the Department says, “This new selection [from the permanent collection] takes a narrower focus, showing how photographs since Conceptual Art have reflected on the medium itself in their work. With many more works by younger artists, the installation also provides more of a snapshot of where photography is at the moment.” Photography on Photography is on view through October 19, 2008.
Photographs began to enter the Met’s collection as early as 1928. Today their photography collection alone includes more than 20,000 works. A quick search through the Met’s online collection database returns names familiar to Art21 such as Ann Hamilton, William Wegman (both Season 1), Gabriel Orozco (Season 2), Robert Adams, and Laurie Simmons (both Season 4). Learn more about the Met’s photography department and its collection here.
Hiroshi Sugimoto in New York Times’ T Magazine
“Isn’t It Iconic?”‚Äîphotographs by Season 3 featured artist Hiroshi Sugimoto are published in the Holiday 2007 issue of the New York Times‘ T Magazine. “In his latest passion, Hiroshi Sugimoto is training his celebrated lens on fashion, documenting the history of modernism as he once did with architecture,” writes T.
View these images online here and watch the related short documentary video (also produced by T) here.
Click on the image of Sugimoto to access the film. Reference his Art21 webpage for a portrait, additional biographical information, interviews, and clips from his Art:21 segment.
[via New York Times]
Major Hiroshi Sugimoto retrospective opens in Germany
On July 14, the Kunstsammlung North Rhine-Westphalia in Düsseldorf opened an exhibition by Season 3-featured artist Hiroshi Sugimoto. The show, simply entitled Hiroshi Sugimoto, is the largest and most comprehensive retrospective ever presented in the German-speaking world of the work of the 59-year-old Japanese photographer based in New York and Tokyo and celebrated for his multiple series of black-and-white photographs exploring time, memory, dreams, and the history of representation.
The exhibition, that begins on the ground floor of the Kunstsammlung North Rhine-Westphalia and continues in nine galleries on the two upper floors, shows thematic series of Sugimoto’s work: Seascapes, Theatres and Drive-in Theatres, Portraits, Pine Trees, Colours of Shadow, Conceptual Forms (Mathematical Forms), Dioramas, Architecture, Lightning Fields and Photogenic Drawing.
Hiroshi Sugimoto can be viewed in Düsseldorf until January 6, 2008, after which the show will travel to Salzburg, Berlin, and Lucerne.
Now on View: Hiroshi Sugimoto at the DeYoung Museum
Season Three featured artist Hiroshi Sugimoto (b. 1948) is the subject of a retrospective that opened at the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco, CA last Saturday. Featured in the exhibition are more than 100 photographs made over the last thirty years. This presentation, in an installation designed by Sugimoto, is the first major survey of Sugimoto’s work. It is organized by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., and the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo.
The exhibition includes examples from the 1970s series, Dioramas and Movie Theaters, as well as images from Seascapes and Portraits, from the 1980s and 1990s, respectively. The show also presents Sea of Buddha (1995); Sugimoto’s more recent Architecture series; and images from his current series, Conceptual Forms (both included in his Art in the Twenty-First Century segment).
Hiroshi Sugimoto runs from July 7, 2007 — September 23, 2007. For more information, click here.
