The exhibition centers on multi-panel works from the late 1970s, constructed of monochromatic abstract paintings and photographs printed on canvas, and a selection of the artist’s recent works, in which she revisits the themes of her earlier “photo-canvases” through the prism of more than three decades and a revolution in digital imaging.

For more than forty years, Kunié Sugiura has investigated the various uses and manifestations of photography, producing a large and varied body of work that includes unique color abstractions from the mid-1960s, photographic works on canvas from the 1970s, and life-sized depictions of people, animals, fish, botanical specimens and other living things made from the early 1980s to the present using the photogram process.

This exhibition, Sugiura’s sixth one-person show at the gallery, will also include a series of collages in which she applied photographs, paint, and blank exposed photographic paper to large sheets of etching paper. Exhibited here for the first time, they were created in dialogue with the larger canvas constructions between 1977 and 1980.

Like other notable Japanese women artists who emerged in the postwar years, Sugiura went West to fulfill her artistic ambitions. Born in Nagoya in 1942 and raised in Tokyo by a single mother, she arrived in the United States at the age of 20. With few personal connections and speaking little English, she enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where the Modernist legacy of the New Bauhaus instilled in her a lifelong commitment to invention and experimentation. After graduating in 1967, she moved to New York and immediately began to show conceptual photographic works in galleries and museum exhibitions including the Whitney Museum’s 1972 Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Painting, curated by Marcia Tucker

In the catalogue accompanying this exhibition, Sugiura notes that “in the 1970s photography was still considered a marginal artistic activity.” Eschewing traditional photographic prints on paper, she experimented by brushing emulsion on to various surfaces, eventually choosing canvas which gave the photographic image "the potential to be as challenging as painting – particularly on a large scale."

The earliest canvases featured Sugiura's own close-up photographs of patterns from nature – tree bark, pebbles, leaves, rocks – and a particularly extreme series of erotic images, enlarged to a monumental scale. Having drawn and painted since childhood, she freely applied graphite and acrylic paint to these works, eventually “almost disregarding the photos underneath … One day I put a painting and photo-canvas next to each other and liked them better together than as separate works … presenting the photograph as a parallel medium, produced something more radical or original.”

In 1980, while searching for a way to make more dynamic drawings, Sugiura adopted the classic black-and-white photogram technique which she has used ever since. Expanding its technical capabilities to create painterly works with increased tonal variations, deep illusionistic spaces, and saturated colors, Sugiura's photograms evoke traditional Japanese art forms such as Ikebana and Sumi-e painting, while more directly evincing the synthesis of East and West that has always informed her aesthetic.

In 2008, inspired by a growing need to contend with rapidly changing technologies and the image-explosion of the virtual world, Sugiura, for the first time in almost thirty years, used her camera to record real places, creating works on canvas that contrast her painterly hand with the cool affect of black & white digital printing. She writes:

In Asian art there has always been a co-existence of the real and the abstract … New expressions often come from crossing mediums and technologies … I can accept photography and painting as both real and abstract – completing one vision.

Works by Kunié Sugiura have been exhibited at major museums throughout Japan, Europe, and the United States and are included in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography; the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, among many others.

This exhibition is accompanied by a 32-page catalogue with twenty-four illustrations in color and black and white, and a conversation with the artist.

Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects is located on the sixth floor of 535 West 22nd Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues. Gallery hours are 10:00 am to 6:00 pm.