Hiroshi Sugimoto valuation
Photographs seascapes, cinema screens and wax figures with exposures measured in hours.
Hiroshi Sugimoto was born in Tokyo in 1948, studied in Los Angeles, and has worked in New York since 1974.
What a work by Hiroshi Sugimoto is worth
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
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Bio
Hiroshi Sugimoto was born in Tokyo in 1948, studied in Los Angeles, and has worked in New York since 1974. The projects are conceptual and are pursued over decades. Theaters are made by opening the shutter for the length of a feature film, so the screen burns out to pure white and lights the auditorium. Seascapes divide every frame exactly in half between water and air, photographed worldwide over forty years, and are deliberately almost indistinguishable from one another. Dioramas and Portraits photograph museum tableaux and wax figures so that they read as living. He also works as an architect and has restored Noh theatre.
Everything is editioned, usually in fives, and print size is part of the edition, so the same image exists as separate works at different scales. He prints in gelatin silver to an exacting standard and the tonal subtlety is the point, which makes any surface damage or fading disproportionately serious; the prints are also usually mounted and framed to his specification. Signature, title, edition and date are normally in pencil on the verso or on a label. The studio and the representing galleries are the reference for edition details.
The titles, and the Hayward survey
The titles carry the information. A Seascape is titled by the sea and the place it was photographed from, with the year, and a Theater by the cinema or drive-in and its town, so the full title identifies the image among many that look alike. The edition number and print size then identify the work.
The Hayward Gallery in London showed Time Machine, the largest survey of his work to that date, from October 2023 to January 2024, before it travelled to Beijing and Sydney. In Japan, the Enoura Observatory at Odawara, a complex of gallery, stages, tea house and gardens overlooking Sagami Bay that he designed for his Odawara Art Foundation, opened in 2017.
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