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 London gallery presents Sugimoto’s work for the first time in Snow White, a collection of photographic works from Sugimoto’s Theaters series (1978– ). The works in the exhibition focus on theaters in America and Europe, specifically Drive-in theaters, Abandoned theaters and most recently a series of Italian Opera theaters. The Theaters series began as an experiment in which Sugimoto used a long exposure (dictated by the duration of each film) to capture the thousands of moving images on a single frame of film. The ‘afterimage’ of this long exposure is one of a gleaming, pure white screen, which remains in our visual memory beyond the physical experience of the actual film screening. With the exhibition Snow White in London and a publication of the same name, the artist will for the first time reveal the titles of many of the films screened and capatured in the Theaters series.

The Abandoned Theaters depict the former grand halls of music and film now dilapidated, left to decay for decades. Reflecting the various economic downturns and changes in patterns of social entertainment, these images evoke a sense of Piranesi’s depictions of classical ruins, or in this case, are ruins made modern. Sugimoto began to photograph the most recent locations a number of Italian Opera Houses in 2014, which includes images of two of the earliest Renaissance theaters in Italy, the Palladio-designed Teatro Olimpico, Vincenza and the Teatro all’Antica, Sabbioneta. These classical Italian buildings are the architectural ancestors and inspiration for the style of the majority of the American Theaters which the artist originally began photographing.

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.