Kunié Sugiura (b. Nagoya, Japan, 1942) is a New York-based artist whose six-decade career has been defined by sustained experimentation across photography, painting, and hybrid forms. After moving to New York in the late 1960s following her studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Sugiura began printing photographs on canvas, developing her distinctive Photocanvas works. Using hand-applied photographic emulsion-often worked further with graphite or acrylic-she transformed close-up images of natural and urban subjects into richly textured, quasi-abstract compositions that challenged conventional distinctions between media.
By the mid-1970s, this exploration evolved into Photopainting, in which photographic images are paired with monochromatic painted panels. These works foreground both the affinities and differences between photography and painting, embodying the ambiguity and duality that run throughout Sugiura's practice. In the 1980s, she shifted again, turning to photograms-one of photography's earliest techniques-producing works that combine botanical forms with geometric elements. Across all phases of her career, Sugiura has consistently resisted categorization, expanding the expressive possibilities of photography while allowing multiple materials, processes, and visual languages to coexist without hierarchy.
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.