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Since the 1960s, Kunié Sugiura has created works that challenge the conventions of traditional photography
while synthesizing elements of Japanese and Western aesthetics. In 1969 she produced a group of monumentally-scaled black and white photographs depicting explicit sexual acts in extreme close-up. Printed on sensitized canvas and enhanced with graphite, they were radical not only in terms of their size and subject but also because they were created by a young woman from Japan, newly arrived in the United States.
These works, and others made at the same time that depict all over textural patterns from
nature, are among Sugiura’s earliest explorations of the conflation of painting and photography, an interest which continues in her art to this day. This exhibition, Sugiura’s fourth one-person show at the gallery, marks the first time that her works on canvas will be shown since the 1972 Annual Exhibition of Painting at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the first ever public presentation of the erotic
images. Seven canvases, each measuring five by seven feet, will be on view in the main gallery.
We are also pleased to announce Kunié Sugiura’s first monograph, Artists and Scientists, published by Nazraeli Press. The book, with an introduction by Vicki Goldberg, surveys Sugiura’s two most recent series: The Artist Papers and The Scientist Papers, both including unique life-size portraits, made using the photogram process in which shadows are directly recorded on light-sensitive paper without the use of a camera.
In conjunction with the book, the gallery is publishing two boxed sets of limited-edition photographic prints. The sixteen prints included in The Artists Papers edition, each measuring 14 by 11 inches, will also be shown in the exhibition.
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