| 06 August 2011
Hiroshi Sugimoto has an acclaimed portfolio of work, and as the exhibition’s entrance rightly claims, can boast the creation of “some of the most celebrated images of our time.” If you’re looking for art but not sure where to begin with so much going on this month, this is a good place to start. It’s a short exhibition of large, striking images by an important artist. Concise blurbs accompany the two parts, Photogenic Drawings and Lightning Fields. Personally, I cringe a bit when blurbs quote the artist’s descriptions when they sound as lofty as: "I head back to the origins of photography, the origins of painting, perhaps the origins of consciousness…" Yet reassuringly, I left with the sense that this statement rang true, rather than being mere artistic posing.
Both series’ are experiments with the technicalities of photographic processes. Photogenic Drawings gives the feeling of looking through a peephole or a microscope, to see something hidden, private or inaccessible. There is an elemental quality from the unsystematic relations between seemingly biological specimens and fragments of material. It could be a representation of the way we try to catalogue the things we’re surrounded by.
In Lightning Fields the correspondence between art and science is strikingly apparent. The images look like something electrical or botanical, like thunderbolts or the veins of a cabbage leaf.
There is something crucial here about the act of looking and how we try to understand imagery by what we are already physically familiar with. I highly recommend this as an introductory, headline exhibition for the Edinburgh International Festival.
Hiroshi Sugimoto, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, From 10am daily
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