PARIS, FRANCE.- The Atelier Brancusi at the Centre Pompidou presents Hiroshi Sugimoto, on view through February 12, 2007. Hiroshi Shugimoto, one of the most important of contemporary Japanese photographers, is to be the guest artist at the Atelier Brancusi. Known for his images of the sea and of cinema screens, his portraits of waxworks and stuffed animals and his architectural photographs, Sugimoto is responsible for a body of work simultaneously poetic and conceptual. During a thirty-year career, he has explored the concepts of time, light and space, and his interest has now turned to geometry and mathematics. At the Centre Pompidou, the dialogue between Sugimoto's and Brancusi's works brings out both artists' interest in form and structure.

A great admirer of Constantin Brancusi's work, Sugimoto is a frequent visitor to the Atelier Brancusi at the Centre Pompidou. For this exhibition, Sugimoto has chosen five recent pieces of his own to show alongside Brancusi's work: two monumental black and white photographs (150 x 120 cm each) from the "Mathematical Forms" series, 0004, Onduloid and 0006, Kuen's Surface (both 2004); two spiral "columns", Conceptual Form 004 and Conceptual Form 005, both more than 2.70 m. high; the third is Conceptual Form 006 (2006), which tapers vertically to a height of more than 1.50 m.

These three-dimensional "conceptual forms" are derived from mathematical formulae developed by the artist using a computer. They testify to Sugimoto's interest in the sciences and his pragmatic approach to creative research. The "endless" structures Conceptual Form 004 and 005, as well as Conceptual Form 006 are inspired by German-made mathematical models in plaster in the collection of the University of Tokyo museum. Having photographed these models, Sugimoto created these three-dimensional forms, which he sees not as sculptures but as "pure applications of mathematical formulae."

These forms play on an illusion of similarity to Brancusi's famous Endless Columns, directly carved by hand in wood and plaster, whose process of creation is however diametrically opposed. In adding an iron base to each of the two "columns" and placing a mirror beneath the tapering structure of Conceptual Form 006, Sugimoto accords as much importance to the support as to the work itself – another "accidental" reference to the work of Brancusi, the originator of the concept of the base as an integral element of the work.