Hiroshi Sugimoto: Unnatural Habitat at Lisson Gallery

Hiroshi Sugimoto is showing at Lisson Gallery's Chelsea space, 504 West 24th Street, in Unnatural Habitat, his third solo exhibition with the gallery. It runs from September 15 to October 24 and traces a fifty-year relationship between the artist and New York, centered on his Diorama series.

Sugimoto moved to the city in 1973. Two years later, at the American Museum of Natural History, he was struck by how alive the dioramas looked: painted backdrops combined with taxidermied animals, a way of representing nature through an artificial form. That encounter began a series he has continued since the mid-1970s. In 2025, fifty years after his first photographs there, he returned to the museum and made new pictures.

The subjects range from lions, condors, jaguars and Homo erectus to wide landscapes such as the Rocky Mountains and a giant cactus forest. Polar Bear (1975), the first image Sugimoto made as an artist, is among the earliest works. Hunting Dogs, first photographed in 1980, was revisited in 2025, when he corrected an uneven patch of sky caused by a burnt-out bulb in the original display. Also on view are the gelatin-silver prints California Condor and Lion (both 1994), along with recently rediscovered negatives enlarged for the first time.

The show also introduces four new color diorama photographs mounted as byōbu, or folding screens. Printed on washi paper and made with traditional Kyoto craftsmanship, they mark only the second major use of color in his photography, after the Opticks series. The screen format lets the image extend beyond the frame into space, echoing the painted surfaces and constructed perspective of the dioramas. Large 2025 pigment prints, Birds of Japan (180 x 320 cm) and Oyster Bay (180 x 376 cm), are also listed among the works.

Born in 1948, Sugimoto lives and works between Tokyo and New York. His practice spans photography, sculpture, architecture and performance; he founded the New Material Research Laboratory in 2008, the Odawara Art Foundation in 2009, and opened the Enoura Observatory in 2017. In 2026 he has a solo exhibition, Extinction, at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, and a major presentation at the Singapore Art Museum, and the Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., which he designed, is set to reopen.

The gallery is open Tuesday to Saturday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., and the show closes on October 24.