Kunié Sugiura: Photopainting

This exhibition is the first US survey of the work of Kunié Sugiura, an artist whose boundary-defying engagement with the photographic medium spans over sixty years. Born in Nagoya, Japan, in 1942, Sugiura came to the United States in 1963 to study at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she majored in photography. After graduation, she relocated to New York and has lived there ever since.

Sugiura’s practice embraces a hybrid approach, blending various mediums and expressing her bicultural identity. The balancing of dualisms —Japanese/American, organic/human-made, and painting/photography — defines her work. Sugiura has stated that her cross-fertilization of photography with painting and sculpture partly stems from her desire that photography be taken seriously as an art form.

The exhibition charts the arc of Sugiura’s long career, beginning with undergraduate work from her Cko series that reflects her sense of isolation as a foreign student in Chicago. Prints made after her move to New York in 1967 demonstrate her use of canvas as a support and new process of working on a large scale. Her Photopaintings from the 1970s take on multidimensional, sculptural qualities, pairing painted and photographic panels with wooden elements. Photograms — images made without a camera on light-sensitive material — that she first created in 1980, capture a wide range of subjects, including flowers and portraits of other artists. Sugiura’s compositions made from X-ray negatives in the 1990s and 2000s combine unrelated pieces from various sources that were cut and pasted together to create unique configurations.

Throughout her career, Sugiura has willfully made artworks that “break with conventions and traditions of both painting and photography.” Despite this inherent rebelliousness, such gestures do not overwhelm Sugiura’s vision to create dynamic and original hybrid forms in which the whole is more than the sum of its parts.