Kunié Sugiura's Six-Decade Retrospective at SFMOMA

SFMOMA presents 'Photopainting,' a retrospective of Kunié Sugiura spanning six decades, featuring over 60 works that blend photography with painting, drawing, and sculpture. Sugiura, who moved from Nagoya to Chicago for art school, incorporates Japanese aesthetics and techniques like graphite on photographs, cameraless photograms, X-rays, and irregular frames. Her early 'Cko' series (1966–67) uses fisheye lenses and psychedelic colors to explore solitude and existentialism, influenced by Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir. Moving to New York in 1967, she engaged with Pop art while generating her own imagery, as seen in works like 'Deadend Street' (1978), which uses four panels and a blank space to evoke the Japanese concept of 'ma' (pause). Later pieces like 'Embriwhoooh' (1995) suture X-ray fragments to comment on life's precariousness. The exhibition runs through September 14, 2025.