Marian Goodman Gallery is pleased to announce two simultaneous exhibitions of works by Hiroshi Sugimoto at the London and Paris Galleries. Working across photography, sculpture, installation and most recently architecture, Sugimoto explores his concerns of time, memory and societal progress, tracing their origins, while bridging Eastern and Western ideologies.

The Paris gallery presents Surface Tension, a collection of images from the artist’s Seascapes series (1980– ). For Sugimoto, contemplating and photographing images of the seas of the world connects the present to the past and as well as the history of those seas to the land where he sets up his camera. The ever moving surface of the sea ensures that each work has it its own unrepeatable characteristics, communicated via weather, atmosphere and the illumination of the sun or the moon. The singular unifying element throughout the series is the perfectly balanced composition between the lower half weighted with the sea, and the airy upper half depicting the sky, each seascape divided dead centre by the horizon line. In Paris, the artist will present work from the 1990’s to his most recent works of the Tasman sea photographed in 2017.

In Paris, the artist will also show five works from his optical glass sculpture series known as the Five Elements. Taking the form from a traditional pagoda, this object comprises five shapes. Each shape has a representational meaning, referring to the Buddhist cosmological doctrine of Five Universals. The square form represents the earth, the globe signifies water, the pyramid is fire, the semi globe is air, and a teardrop form at the top represents emptiness. Each work has a single seascape embedded in the glass globe. In the downstairs vaulted gallery stands one of the Five Elements sculptures across from a photograph of Kegon Falls, Japan, a popular tourist destination and attraction because of its magnificent waterfall.

Snow White, a new limited edition book published by Damiani, will be launched at Librairie Marian Goodman, Paris, on the 28th of October from 5:30 to 6:00pm, before the opening reception at the gallery. The artist will be present.

Hiroshi Sugimoto (b. 1948, Tokyo, Japan) divides his time between New York and Tokyo. He has organized and curated several exhibitions of his own work as well as traditional Japanese art from his personal collection, sometimes juxtaposing the two bodies of material in single exhibitions, such as the History of History, co-organized with Japan Society, 2005-2006, and the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, and more recently Aujourd'hui le monde est mort (Lost Human Genetic Archive), Palais de Tokyo, 2014. A retrospective of his work was organized by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. & The Mori Art Museum Tokyo, 2006. Other recent museum exhibitions include Black Box, curated by Philip Larratt-Smith, presented at Fundacion Mapfre, Barcelona and Madrid in 2016, and travelled to FOAM, The Photography Museum Amsterdam, 2016-2017, The Sea and the Mirror, an exhibition of large-scale seascapes, at Château La Coste, 8th May – 3rd September 2017, and Le Notti Bianche, the debut of the Italian Opera Theaters, at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, 16 May – 1 October 2017.