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A new, comprehensive survey of Sugimoto’s five-decade career, from grand dioramas and seascapes to eerie portraits of wax effigies and more Through his expansive exploration of the possibilities of still images, Hiroshi Sugimoto has created some of the most alluringly enigmatic photographs of our time?pictures that are meticulously crafted and deeply thought-provoking, familiar yet tantalizingly ambiguous. Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine is a comprehensive survey of work produced over the past five decades, featuring selections from all of Sugimoto’s major series, as well as lesser-known works that illuminate his innovative, conceptually driven approach to making pictures. Texts by international writers, artists and scholars?including Geoffrey Batchen, Edmund de Waal, Mami Kataoka, Ralph Rugoff, Lara Strongman and Margaret Wertheim?highlight his work’s philosophical yet playful inquiry into the nature of representation and art, our understanding of time and memory, and the paradoxical character of photography as a medium so well suited to both documenting and invention. Hiroshi Sugimoto (born 1948) has exhibited extensively in major museums and galleries throughout the world, and his work is held in numerous public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; National Gallery, London; National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; Smithsonian, Washington, DC; and Tate, London, among others. Sugimoto divides his time between Tokyo and New York City.

A Legendary Artist Revisited Unknown to many, Niko Pirosmani is revered as a legend in his native Georgia. Conveying a sense of poignant empathy, his portraits, animal paintings, landscapes and scenes from everyday life painted around 1900 in a flourishing Tbilisi draw on medieval iconography and testify to a deeply felt sense of belonging. At the same time, the avant-garde recognised a novel and radically new form of painting in his work. Like Henri Rousseau or Marc Chagall, Pirosmani is one of the exceptional yet difficult to categorize proponents of early modern art. This catalogue demonstrates Pirosmani's qualities in numerous illustrations, showing how his rapid brushstrokes on black oilcloth give the sparsely applied colors a glow as if coming from a dark depth. Pirosmani was a master of concentration-and a storyteller. As expertly explained in the catalogue by a selection of Georgian art historians, he was a unique artist, a contradictory figure and an important part of the art scene in Tbilisi, then considered the "Paris of the East."

Cinematic scenes with painterly compositions that place contemporary photography within the broader canon of art history Since the late 1970s, Canadian photographer Jeff Wall has made significant contributions to establishing photography as an autonomous medium. He is considered the founder of "staged" photography and generates mostly large-format photographs—often inspired by literature, film and art history—composed in a multilayered and subtle way from a multitude of individual shots. Wall makes a distinction between his documentary still life photos and his "cinematographic" pictures, the latter of which take months or even years to complete. His contemporary genre scenes invoke famous works by Hokusai, Manet, Kafka, Ellison and others. Among the more than 50 works collected in the catalog of the large-scale solo exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler are Wall's iconic large-format slides in light boxes, black-and-white photographs and color photographic prints. His most recent images, representing the entire spectrum of his oeuvre, enter into a dialogue with works from the time of Wall's beginnings as an artist and reveal a wide range of references in terms of content and form. These new works will be on display and published in book form for the first time. Jeff Wall (born 1946) received degrees in art history from the University of British Columbia and the Courtauld Institute of Art. After teaching for a few years he turned to photography in earnest in 1977; he continues to experiment with both digital and analog techniques. Wall's work was included in Documenta 10 and 11 and has been exhibited at Tate Modern, the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Museo Tamayo.