Within the history of photography, especially after the Bauhaus, a set of loosely related practices have attempted to subvert photography’s stubborn literalness in recording the world before the camera’s lens. If, in the version of art history laid out by MoMA founding director Alfred Barr and critic Clement Greenberg, twentieth-century art is an ineluctable march toward abstraction, photography – painting’s insecure step-child – was not going to be left behind. For almost 60 years, Japanese-born artist Kunié Sugiura has used the raw materials of photographic printing in a manner that places her firmly in the tradition of photo-experimentation that was the legacy of Surrealism, on the one hand, and the New Vision photography of the 1920s and 1930s, on the other – a spirit and a pedagogic method that was transplanted to the U.S. at the New Bauhaus/Institute of Design in Chicago, which she attended in the mid 1960s.
At Alison Bradley Projects, Pauline Vermare, a French curator who was previously the cultural director for Magnum Photos, has assembled an intimate, career-spanning survey of Sugiura’s prodigious output. On view through May 10, the show includes Sugiura’s earliest work, the Cko series from 1966, produced when she was still a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. These jewel-like nude studies were inspired by the fish-eye distortions of Bill Brandt’s iconic nudes, which she saw in 1964, as well as by older Surrealist figurative work such as André Kertész’s Distortions and Hans Bellmer’s Poupées. In Cko L29 (1967), she creates a grid pattern over her distorted nude figure; set against a magenta background, the piece nods toward psychedelia and the Japanese avant-garde.