SFMOMA‘s Kunié Sugiura: Photopainting is the first US survey of the work of an artist whose boundary-defying engagement with photography spans over sixty years. Her cross-fertilization of photography with painting and sculpture partially stems from a desire that photography be taken seriously as art.

Kunié Sugiura: Photopainting charts the arc of a long career. It begins with her undergraduate Cko series, reflecting isolation as a foreign student at the Art Institute of Chicago. Prints made after her move to New York demonstrate a new process of working on a large scale. Her Photopaintings exhibit multidimensional qualities, pairing with photograms first created in 1980 and used throughout Sugiura’s later work. Despite the rebelliousness of her artwork, gestures that “break with traditions of both painting and photography” do not overwhelm Sugiura’s vision of forms in which the whole is more than the sum of its parts.