Time Machine – Hiroshi Sugimoto
‘I always think of the camera as a kind of time machine, I’m not looking to the future, I’m looking to the past, going back to study the origins of human beings and human civilisation. I want to ride in a time machine to go back and see the beginning.’
– Hiroshi Sugimoto
Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine, is the first survey of the internationally renowned artist’s work to be presented in Australia. The exhibition brings together close to 100 of the artist’s most important works dating from the 1970s through to the present day.
Over the last 50 years, Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto (b. Tokyo, 1948) has created some of the most celebrated and recognisable images in contemporary art. Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine highlights the artist’s philosophical yet playful inquiry into time and memory, and photography’s ability to both document and invent.
Chronicling five decades of the influential artist’s practice, Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine encompasses works from all of the artist’s major photographic series and includes rarely-seen pieces from the photographer's own collection, alongside works from the Odawara Art Foundation in Japan.
Sugimoto’s approach to photography has stretched and reshaped our ideas about how photographs record time, light and space. For Sugimoto, photography is uniquely suited for preserving and picturing time’s passage, functioning as a form of time machine. Through images that unsettle and inspire, he has transformed traditional photographic genres such as still life, landscape, portraiture and abstraction to open new perspectives on how we understand history, nature, art and existence itself.
The history of photography is embedded in Sugimoto's use of the photograph as the bearer of ideas. Throughout his career the artist has revisited concepts and practices from 19th-century photography. Meticulous in his craft, he frequently works with an old-fashioned wooden view camera and mixes his own darkroom chemicals. Inspired by experiments and subjects from the early history of photography, he has captured a range of subjects related to science and mathematics as well as painting and architecture.
Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine has been developed through an international partnership between the MCA Australia, Hayward Gallery, London and UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing. The original London presentation was curated by Hayward Gallery Director, Ralph Rugoff. The exhibition at the MCA Australia is curated by MCA Australia Curator Megan Robson and MCA Australia Director of Curatorial & Digital Lara Strongman.
Suzanne Cotter, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia Director said, ‘Sugimoto is one of the world’s preeminent living artists whose remarkable art has entered into the public consciousness as part of our visual lexicon. The MCA could not be more honoured and excited to be presenting his work in this extraordinary retrospective survey which will inspire and delight in its visual and meditative richness. His is truly an art for now.’
Ralph Rugoff, Hayward Gallery Director said, ’Hiroshi Sugimoto is constantly playing with the fact that photography is a medium that lends itself both to documenting, but also to invention. No one has ever made photographs like these.’
$28.00 Adults*
$20.00 Concession*
Free Youth (13–17)
Free Children (12 & under)
Free MCA Members
* Excludes booking fee
