Hiroshi Sugimoto: Optical Allusion

About

For his first exhibition since joining Lisson Gallery, Hiroshi Sugimoto presents a new series of large-scale photographic prints, collectively titled Opticks, which rely on a prism to split ‘white’ light into its seven constituent colors and many more gradations and shades in between. Through the revelation of this hidden, polychromatic world that exists all around us, Sugimoto simultaneously creates stunning, abstract compositions worthy of modernist painting, despite each image depicting an entirely natural phenomenon. Sugimoto not only follows in the footsteps of Isaac Newton, who published his work Opticks: or, A Treatise of the Reflexions, Refractions, Inflexions and Colours of Light in 1704, but also realigns his practice from a photographer of black- and-white fields, forms and figures, towards a scientific surveyor of blazing color and invisible possibility.