Artist: Hiroshi Sugimoto

Hiroshi Sugimoto’s third solo exhibition at Lisson marks a resonant return to New York, tracing a fifty-year dialogue between the artist and the city that helped shape his vision. In Unnatural Habitat, Sugimoto revisits the body of work that first revealed his extraordinary ability to suspend both time and reality. Featuring photographs from the artist’s Diorama series, some of which were created this past year through access to dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History, recently rediscovered negatives enlarged for the first time, and new washi paper screens that transform his images into luminous byōbu, this exhibition unites photographic and sculptural forms to explore perception, artifice and immersive pictorial depth. Together, these bodies of work affirm Sugimoto’s enduring investigation into the poetic boundaries of lens-based media.

While visiting the American Museum of Natural History in 1975, two years after moving to New York, Sugimoto was struck by the lifelike qualities of its dioramas. Combining painted environments with taxidermied animals, these constructed habitats offered a means of representing nature through an inherently artificial form. The Diorama series emerged from this encounter and has remained an ongoing body of work since the mid 1970s. Sugimoto’s return to the museum in 2025, fifty years after he first photographed there, extends this longstanding engagement, bringing together works spanning the history of the series. The dioramas on view at Lisson depict a range of subjects from lions, condors, jaguars and Homo erectus to expansive landscapes like the Rocky Mountains and a giant cactus forest. Among the earliest are Polar Bear (1975), the first image Sugimoto made as an artist, and Hunting Dogs, first photographed in 1980 and revisited in 2025 when Sugimoto adjusted an uneven area of sky caused by a burnt-out bulb within the original display. Collectively, these works demonstrate the enduring tension within the Diorama series between the preservation of a constructed reality and its transformation through photography.

The exhibition also introduces a further development through four new color diorama photographs presented as folding screens, or byōbu. Printed on washi paper and produced through traditional Kyoto craftsmanship, these screens constitute only the second major use of color in Sugimoto’s photographic practice, following his Opticks series. The folding-screen format extends the photograph beyond the conventions of the framed image, giving the works a sculptural and spatial presence while recalling the painted surfaces and constructed perspectives of the dioramas themselves. Their use of color introduces a distinct visual register to a body of work historically defined by Sugimoto’s precise black-and-white photography.

Unnatural Habitat is presented at a significant moment in Sugimoto’s wider practice. In 2026, the exhibition coincides with a major solo presentation at the Singapore Art Museum and precedes the reopening of the Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., designed by the artist.