Hiroshi Sugimoto - with your back to the heart
21.11.2020 - 11.04.2021

The eighteenth Rolla Foundation exhibition features the famous Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto (Tokyo, 1948) and his remarkable Seascapes. Active since the mid-1970s, he took the first picture in the seascape series in 1980 and continues to photograph seas and skies the world over.

Forty years after that first photograph, Philip and Rosella Rolla are displaying a portfolio from their collection entitled Time Exposed, comprising fifty seascapes selected by Sugimoto and printed in 1991.

The photographer always places the horizon at the same level and annuls the rest of the landscape. No people or other distractions ever appear in the pictures. Earth has changed over the centuries and Sugimoto sees the marine landscape as one of the few visions to have remained unchanged since the time of prehistoric man, drawing from it a reassuring sense of security, as if he were returning to his ancestral home.

Hiroshi Sugimoto was born in Japan in 1948. Starting in the 1970s, he worked primarily in photography, eventually adding performing arts production and architecture to his multidisciplinary practice. His work investigates themes of time, empiricism and metaphysics. Sugimoto’s work is held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Tate Gallery, London; among many others. His work has been the subject of numerous monographs. In 2017, he founded the Odawara Art Foundation, dedicated to traditional Japanese and international contemporary performing arts. Sugimoto is the recipient of the National Arts Club Medal of Honor in Photography; The Royal Photographic Society’s Centenary Medal; Isamu Noguchi Award; Officier de L’ordre des Arts et des Lettres; Praemium Imperiale Award for Painting; PHotoEspaña Prize; and the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography, among others.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog with a text by Professor Michael Jakob.