Rothko/Sugimoto: Dark Paintings and Seascapes

The inaugural exhibition juxtaposes Mark Rothko's late black and grey paintings with Hiroshi Sugimoto’s contemporary photographs of bodies of water. The exhibition marks the first private gallery presentation of Rothko’s work in London in nearly fifty years and continues Pace’s five-decade tradition of exhibitions that explore affinities between artists working across decades and mediums.

Dark Paintings and Seascapes pairs eight acrylic paintings by Rothko and eight gelatin silver prints by Sugimoto, revealing two different artistic approaches that arrive at similar conclusions. Rothko's use of medium as pure abstraction communes with the work of Hiroshi Sugimoto who, decades later, used the medium itself to reconsider photography's relationship to his viewers’ perception of the world. In addition to exploring the visual dialogue between Rothko’s dark paintings and Sugimoto’s photographs—both characterized by a binary format of black and grey rectangular elements—the pairings mine the philosophical affinities between the two artists, each offering a meditation on universal and cosmological concerns.