Review: Rothko and Sugimoto at Pace Gallery

New York’s Pace gallery – one the Big Apple’s most influential commercial spaces when it comes to modern and contemporary art – has leased a London outpost in the Royal Academy of Arts' Burlington Gardens building, renovated by architect David Chipperfield RA. The gallery has announced its ambitious intentions with a museum-quality inaugural show: a two-person exhibition that compares and contrasts American Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko with the contemporary Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto.

_{Installation view of 'Rothko/Sugimoto: Dark Paintings and Seascapes', Pace London, 6 Burlington Gardens, London, October 4 through November 17, 2012. © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko / Artist Rights Society, New York (ARS). Courtesy Pace Gallery. © Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy Pace Gallery. Photography courtesy Pace London.}

Rothko is represented by a series know as his ‘Dark Paintings’, canvases painted by the artist shortly before his suicide in 1970; a rectangular field of black meets a rectangular field of grey along a central horizontal line. This abstract ‘horizon’ is juxtaposed with a literal one in Sugimoto’s ongoing series of minimalist greyscale seascapes, in which the sky meets a body of water.

_{Installation view of 'Rothko/Sugimoto: Dark Paintings and Seascapes', Pace London, 6 Burlington Gardens, London, October 4 through November 17, 2012. © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko / Artist Rights Society, New York (ARS). Courtesy Pace Gallery. © Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy Pace Gallery. Photography courtesy Pace London.}

The Tokyo-born artist plays with aperture widths and exposure lengths so that the water and sky lose nearly all detail, appearing like fields of unmodulated grey, white or black. Less than an actual landscape, the artist’s subject is light and how it can be captured over a period of time. Figurative photography is here pushed as far as possible towards abstraction.

_{Installation view of 'Rothko/Sugimoto: Dark Paintings and Seascapes', Pace London, 6 Burlington Gardens, London, October 4 through November 17, 2012. © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko / Artist Rights Society, New York (ARS). Courtesy Pace Gallery. © Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy Pace Gallery. Photography courtesy Pace London.}

The binary structure that both bodies of work share leads one to think on other binaries: light and dark, presence and absence, life and death. Some of Rothko’s works are almost unbearably sad – if you give enough time to let them do their work, the brown grounds underneath the greys begin to come through before your eyes. The dark fields are no longer inert but alive with hidden tone, pathos, meaning.

• 'Rothko/Sugimoto: Dark Paintings and Seascapes' is at Pace London until 17 November 2012.

• Royal Academy of Arts