Kunié Sugiura was born in Nagoya in 1942 and currently lives and works in New York. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) in 1967.
At SAIC, Sugiura studied under the conceptual photographer Kenneth Josephson; after almost 50 years, she continues to explore a diverse range of photographic expression through the adoption of various techniques. After experimenting with color photography in the 60s and combining acrylic paint with photography on canvas in the 70s, Sugiura began producing photograms with objects from everyday life in the 80s. While pursuing connections between photography and other media, she has also been interested in photography’s materiality, and the way that this materiality can be made abstract.
Through her works, she captures light, time, the transience of nature and its memory. The result is an almost contradictory work that harnesses tensions between the concrete and the abstract, while also standing between the improvised and the constructed. Sugiura’s oeuvres seek to question the ‘object’ and its abstraction as captured within the context of the photographic image. Influences from traditional Japanese aesthetics such as notions of ephemerality and transience also appear to resonate within Sugiura’s works.
Sugiura’s major solo exhibitions include “Time Emit”, Visual Arts Center of New Jersey (Summit, 2008) and “Dark Matters / Light Affairs”, The University of California (Davis, 2001).
She has received the Artist’s Fellowship, New York Foundation for the Arts (1998) and the Higashikawa Prize (2007). Her works are included in the permanent collections of the Denver Art Museum; Tate Modern, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Dallas Museum of Art and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography.
