A COLLECTOR’S JOURNEY AT THE TURN OF THE MILLENNIUM

Hiroshi Sugimoto (b. 1948)
Ligurian Sea
blind stamped with the title and number 'LIGURIAN SEA 6/25 394' (along the lower margin)
gelatin silver print
image: 16½ x 21¼in. (42 x 54cm.)
sheet: 19⅛ X 23⅝in. (48.7 x 60cm.)
Executed in 1993, this work is number six from an edition of twenty-five

Provenance:
Jay Jopling/White Cube, London.
Private Collection, Europe.
Anon. sale, Sotheby's London, 22 October 2002, lot 302.
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner.

Exhibited:
New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Sugimoto, 1995-1998 (another from the edition exhibited, illustrated p. 69). This exhibition later travelled to Houston, Contemporary Arts Museum; Gunma, Hara Museum ARC and Akron, Akron Art Museum.
Tokyo, Mori Art Museum, Hiroshi Sugimoto, 2005-2006 (another from the edition exhibited, illustrated p. 129). This exhibition later travelled to Washington D.C., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution.

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Specialist Notes:

‘Sugimoto’s seascapes (begun in 1980) represent various bodies of water in the same deceptively simple composition: the horizon line evenly divides the frame into water and air ... They are not so much depictions of geographic locations as they are attempts at capturing on film the qualities of light, air, water and atmosphere. In emphasizing these natural elements, Sugimoto drapes like a veil the decidedly intangible over the specific, the concept over the concrete, returning all seas to their fundamental state as water and air. Through the nearly abstract, almost sacred geometric composition and the repetition of this yin-yang relationship from image to image, from ocean to ocean around the world, the sea is returned to a kind of primordial state untouched by humankind. Sugimoto’s seascapes are not photographs of the sea; rather they are images that arise out of the murky depths of the past, time machines that are capable of extending our vision back beyond our own existence, images that focus on the sea with the very substances - water and air - that would ultimately give rise to life itself’ (K. Brougher, ‘Impossible Photography’, Hiroshi Sugimoto, exh. cat. Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C., 2005, p. 23).

This work is featured in our How to Collect like a Tate Curator feature – find out more here.

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