Kunié Sugiura: Ubiquitous Conjunction curated by Ryo Sawayama
Forthcoming exhibition
Overview
Kunié Sugiura, Christmas Lights, 1979 Photographic emulsion, acrylic on canvas, 73.66 x 325.12 cm, 29 x 128 in.
galerie frank elbaz is pleased to present Ubiquitous Conjunction, the first solo exhibition of Kunié Sugiura at the gallery.
Born in Japan, Sugiura moved to the United States in 1963 at the age of twenty to study at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she first encountered photography as a medium and began her artistic practice. After graduation, she relocated to New York in 1967 and has been based there ever since. In 2025, SFMOMA presented a survey spanning over sixty years of her career — the first major survey of her work in the United States.
Sugiura's practice pursues photography not as an autonomous medium but as a cross-disciplinary one. Her work brings into conjunction phenomena and matter, photography and painting, images and sculpture, and disparate times and spaces. In this way, her work fully unleashes the power of conjunction, inherent in photography as a hybrid form.
Encompassing darkroom experimentation — montage, solarization, photograms — Sugiura's practice extends the experimental history of photography's early days. At the same time, her work anticipated the expanded field of contemporary photography, in which the medium has come to be embraced as a form of fine art. Her practice stages an encounter between photography's past and its future.
Ubiquitous Conjunction is curated by Ryo Sawayama, a Japanese art critic, and brings together representative works from across Sugiura's career, from her earliest pieces to her most recent. An essay on Sugiura's work, written by the curator, will be included in the accompanying printed material.
Born in Japan, Sugiura moved to the United States in 1963 at the age of twenty to study at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she first encountered photography as a medium and began her artistic practice. After graduation, she relocated to New York in 1967 and has been based there ever since. In 2025, SFMOMA presented a survey spanning over sixty years of her career — the first major survey of her work in the United States.
Sugiura's practice pursues photography not as an autonomous medium but as a cross-disciplinary one. Her work brings into conjunction phenomena and matter, photography and painting, images and sculpture, and disparate times and spaces. In this way, her work fully unleashes the power of conjunction, inherent in photography as a hybrid form.
Encompassing darkroom experimentation — montage, solarization, photograms — Sugiura's practice extends the experimental history of photography's early days. At the same time, her work anticipated the expanded field of contemporary photography, in which the medium has come to be embraced as a form of fine art. Her practice stages an encounter between photography's past and its future.
Ubiquitous Conjunction is curated by Ryo Sawayama, a Japanese art critic, and brings together representative works from across Sugiura's career, from her earliest pieces to her most recent. An essay on Sugiura's work, written by the curator, will be included in the accompanying printed material.
