Hiroshi Sugimoto Folktales

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Trees, 2022, pigment print on rice paper, two eight-panel screens, 71 3/8 x 686 5/8 in. overall? 57 feet? Astronomy missions have been destroyed by imperial/metric confusion like this. how about 181.3 x 686.6 cm, Fraenkel Gallery? The thing with screens, as with Hiroshi Sugimoto, is that there’s never enough. And so it goes with Hiroshi Sugimoto screens. I thought I got at least a sense of Sugimoto’s engagement with the byōbu form, of the arc. But there’s more. Fraenkel Gallery has a portfolio with eight examples of what they call photographic screens, mostly from 2021-2. Most are landscapes. One, Lightning Fields, is composed from an earlier series. And one is both. Pine Trees, which was inspired by a screen, finally became a screen itself. Though it seems that the original six-photo compositions have been transformed to eight-panel screens. I’m sure it’s glorious, even if it is only 686 cm instead of 686 inches. But that’s not where this started, or picked up.…