Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Day for Night




According to Bloomberg News: "At the Gagosian Gallery on West 21st Street, Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto’s exhibition, which opened on Nov. 6, 2008, has been extended through March 7. The prices of some of his meditative seascapes have been reduced from $450,000 to $360,000, with plenty still available, the gallery said."

Well, if you price an entire photography show at $450,000 a pop in this economy, you're taking a chance. Nevertheless, don't let empty pockets keep you away from seeing this exhibition. And make sure you make it past the first large white gallery into the back black room. There are even guards to guide you from the light into the near total darkness.

In brief, the show is a re-working of Sugimoto's famous minimalist seascapes with the difference being one largely of scale and presentation. The photographs, originally exhibited at 20 x 24 inches, are now a whopping 60 x 72 inches with 7 daylight pictures in the front gallery and 7 nighttime ones in the back. I'm not sure that seeing water/sky/horizon in varying shades of abstraction and conceptualism has quite the same kick as it did 30 years ago when both Joel Meyerowitz and Sugimoto brought their own particular vision to the subject, however if you want to see a theatrical and visual tour de force, the likes of which we may not be seeing again for a while, get to the gallery before the show closes.


1 comment:

melange muse said...

Cool. I'm definitely having to go check this out.