Kunié Sugiura’s practice spans photography, painting, sculpture, and installation, and is defined by a sustained investigation into the boundaries between mediums and the material conditions of image-making. Sugiura emerged as an artist in New York in the 1970s with her innovative “photopaintings” alongside the Pictures Generation, but always maintained a distinct experimental trajectory; in these works, photographic prints are layered with painterly gestures, challenging conventional hierarchies between mechanical reproduction and the handmade. Since, her work has consistently incorporated unconventional materials— such as X-ray film, fiberglass, and industrial pigments—and continues to explore the physicality of light, surface, and process itself. Rather than using photography solely as a representational tool, Sugiura treats it as a sculptural and painterly substance, probing how images are constructed, altered, and perceived. Across decades, her work has remained both formally rigorous and conceptually open- ended, emphasizing experimentation, hybridity, and the poetic possibilities of material transformation.

Kunié Sugiura (b. 1942, Nagoya, Japan) received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1967, and has lived and worked in New York since the late 1960s. Recent solo exhibitions include Kunié Sugiura: Photopainting at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Kunié Sugiura: Something Else at Alison Bradley Projects (New York, NY), Boundaries and Coexistence at Taka Ishii Gallery (Tokyo, Japan), and Kunié Sugiura: Discoveries at the Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University (Ithaca, NY). Recent group shows include Shifting Landscapes at the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY), Life with Photography: 75 Years of the Eastman Museum at the George Eastman Museum (Rochester, NY), MOMAT Collection at The National Museum of Modern Art (Tokyo, Japan), and I’M SO HAPPY YOU ARE HERE at Rencontres d’Arles (Arles, France). Her work is held in numerous public collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Denver Art Museum; Tate Modern, London; Tokyo Photographic Art Museum; Princeton University Art Museum, New Jersey; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others.