Kunié Sugiura: The Railroad Station, 1977 (detail). Gelatin silver prints, acrylic, on rag paper, 4 1/2 by 13 inches (detail), 30 by 68 3/4 overall. Copyright Kunié Sugiura, courtesy Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York
Despite showing with Leslie Tonkonow since the mid-‘90s, the New York-based Japanese photographer Kunié Sugiura remains under the radar. Most of the works in this show, all dating from the late 1970s to the early ‘80s and on view for the first time, are diptychs: a small black-and-white snapshot of a train station or an apartment building adjacent to a monochromatic rectangle of paper (there are also a few triptychs, and a few stand-alone color photos). Sugiura’s spare compositions cleverly straddle the often separate worlds of painting and photography, figuration and abstraction.