PARIS.- Set around the reconstruction of a noh stage, the exhibition presented at the Institut Giacometti highlights the closeness between the researches of both artists, in which apparitions and reality enter into dialogue. Referring to the theatre, this exhibition proposes a selection of sculptures by Alberto Giacometti and photographs by Hiroshi Sugimoto as well as films and antique noh masks from the artist’s collection.

Born in Tokyo in 1948, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Japanese photographer of international repute, presents for the first time in Europe four works from the series Past Presence (2013-2016) as well as a set of polaroids made between 2013 and 2018. His personal choice of emblematic works by Giacometti are being exhibited in an original and distinctive manner.

In 2013, MoMA in New York invited Sugimoto to take photographs of the masterpieces exhibited in the museum’s Sculpture Garden. Giacometti’s Tall Woman III was the first work to capture his attention. The series Past Presence, focused on a choice of icons from Modern art, questions the capacity of art to actualise a symbolic force in today’s world.

The gift made by the artist to the Fondation Giacometti in 2019 includes eight photographs made from Giacometti’s works within that series.

Having settled in New York in 1974, Sugimoto places his practice within a conceptual approach to photography. Each series arises from protocols establishing its actual making. He remains attached to silver halide photography, to the large format camera and has become particularly interested in the chemistry of development. The negatives of polaroids, self-portraits and portraits of relatives and friends show his passion for the photographic material and reflect in this exhibition the drawings Giacometti made on random supports: newspapers, books, paper tablecloths and envelopes.

Past Presence

In 2013, The Museum of Modern Art in New York commissioned me to take photographs of its sculpture garden which, designed by Philip Johnson, houses many masterpieces of modernist sculpture. First, I decided to approach this commission by adopting the blurred method that I had used in my series “Architecture”. Among those countless masterpieces, the first to attract my attention was a sculpture by Giacometti. A spindly piece whose body was no longer made of flesh but which expressed a way of being “extreme” corresponding to what I wanted to represent in my approach to photography.

I photographed that sculpture twice, once in broad daylight and once at dusk. I thought it conjured up two characters of the noh theatre. The noh talks about dead souls that come back to life and become visible. In the maejite (the first part of a noh play) the dead take a human shape and moan about their disappearance. In the nochijite (second part), the ghosts of the dead appear again and perform a sad and bitter dance because they can’t find peace in their graves. In the theatrical performance, we see the dead with a degree of reality not only depending on the mastery of the interpretation but to a greater extent on the capacities of the spectator to use their imagination. As I photographed Giacometti’s sculpture, I felt I was attending a noh performance because in the Noh theatre, the past manifests itself as present. Inspired by that sculpture, I photographed other sculptures in the garden. -- Hiroshi Sugimoto October 2023

The noh, Giacometti and the Eastern world

Giacometti’s art was not nourished by the culture of the Far East as it was by Egyptian sculpture. Only a few pieces show his interest in Asia.

His encounter with the Japanese philosopher Isaku Yanaihara in 1955 deeply influenced his research on the representation of the human figure. Paintings, sculptures, light sketches on big sheets or scribbles in biro on a newspaper, drawn in a cafe in the middle of the summers 1956 to 1961 during which Yanaihara was the regular and almost exclusive model of Giacometti show the fascination of the artist for his model. Those daily dialogues motivated Giacometti and Annette, his spouse, to mix with the Japanese microcosm of Paris and to attend the performances of Kabuki and noh theatre organised by the young Théâtre des Nations, set up in 1957. Sugimoto is involved with the religious and artistic legacy of Japan and extends his practice to the fields of architecture and theatre. In 2017, he established the Odawara Art Foundation dedicated to the promotion of contemporary forms of performance. In his latest exhibitions, he incorporates historical documents and objects coming from his own collections. He sets up large historical frescoes in which the time of creation is juxtaposed with that of the human species whose future he questions.

In 2022, in collaboration with Shin Suzuki, Sugimoto produced and filmed staged performances of noh theatre in the historical site of Himeji castle. Four extracts will be shown in the exhibition. Influenced by Shintoist and Buddhist traditions as much as by popular shows, the noh has been standardised in the 15th century. It is made of simple elements: a travelling bonze, a bridge, a dream. The bonze crosses the bridge and frees himself of all the constraints of secular time as he enters the realm of shadows. The masks worn by the actors help them to summon the spirits of the dead onto the stage.

Giacometti and the living

The Staged exhibition is set around the reproduction of a noh stage. Five of Giacometti’s sculptures stand out against the stage’s traditional curtain printed with the pine motif created by Tosa Mitsunobu, a 16th century painter, as an echo to the cluster of trees close to the sanctuaries in front of which the noh plays were performed at the beginning.

In 1935, Giacometti went back to working with a model. After a period during which his sculptures gradually became smaller - a process he described as uncontrollable - Giacometti found the expression of his vision in the extreme elongation and slenderness of his figures.

As Giacometti’s friends the writers Genet, Sartre and others, Sugimoto regards Giacometti’s sculptures as apparitions and connects to death the fragility of their silhouette and the singularity of their bronze surface weathered away as if by time.

Sugimoto selected emblematic works from the 1950s and 1960s: Tall Woman, described by Giacometti as sculpture brought to its highest point, Walking Man I, in real life scale. Those two sculptures placed at the front of the stage appear like the essence of human existence.

Representing the noh musicians kneeling at the back of the stage, the half-figures seem to come straight out of an Egyptian tomb.

In 1965, Giacometti capitalised on the dramatic intensity of the physique of the photographer Elie Lotar (Bust of seated man (Lotar III)), one of his last models, as he appeared to create in the indistinct matter of the bust, the fusion between organic and mineral.

Experimenting with the material

Fascinated by the precision of the depictions of the Northern painters from the 15th century, Sugimoto made several portraits of historical figures from the wax models of Madame Tussaud’s. The polaroids play a part in his preparation before he takes photographs with a large format camera, his usual technique. He manipulates solarised negatives to make ghostly figures appear by exploiting original effects in the material. This series, shown for the first time in public is the first series to contain real portraits: of himself and of friends and relatives.

Some of Giacometti’s drawings in biro, done randomly on countless supports - bits of tablecloths, invitation cards, envelopes, newspapers - are presented alongside Sugimoto’s photographs. In Giacometti’s practice, the drawing can be a study, a reflection on projects but also a way to revisit old works already made. After the war, he pursued his research in the studio, as a mirror image: standing woman, walking man, heads, still lifes, portraits of his models. The drawings show a creative output that was sustained like an endless flow at every moment of his life.

Tall woman looking at the sea

Hiroshi Sugimoto discovered the sea at the age of six, from a train taking him from Atami to Tokyo. He said it was the moment he became aware of his individual existence, detached from the universe: “a very clear horizon, a cloudless sky… My first conscious memories start there.”

Made all over the world, the Sea scapes are timeless landscapes in which sea and sky are superimposed in variations at times infinitesimal. Superimposing the vertical of Giacometti’s Tall Woman IV to the horizon of Baltic Sea, Rugen, a large photograph dated from 1996, Sugimoto wanted to transfer into the exhibition space, that element of contemplative meditation. Tall Woman IV, one of the emblematic figures of the research undertaken by Giacometti in November 1958 for the commission, never completed, regarding the square in front of the Chase Manhattan Bank in New York, stares at a landscape also considered by its photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto as the expression of the essence of the world.