Known for her rich and extensive explorations of photographic language, Sarah Charlesworth’s elegant and distilled photographs have, for over three decades, probed the varied ways in which images both describe and shape the world around us.
In her most recent series, Work in Progress, Charlesworth collapses the distinction between the photograph and the tools employed in its creation. Light filtered through colored transparent paper becomes at once the subject and the medium as it highlights the artist’s camera and working materials. Each image discloses its own process as it celebrates the act of making.
Early work from Sarah Charlesworth is currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum in The Pictures Generation, 1974-1984, an exhibition named after the seminal 1977 show at Artist’s Space. Charlesworth’s photographs are seen here alongside her peers at the advent of this period in which artists began to assume a critical relationship to the dominance of media culture and the conventions of representation. The Pictures Generation, 1974-1984 will be on view from 21 April to 2 August.
Sarah Charlesworth has had nearly fifty solo exhibitions, including a major traveling museum retrospective organized by SITE Santa Fe in 1997. Her work appears in numerous museum collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Guggenheim Museum; the Metropolitan Museum; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; MOCA, Los Angeles and the Walker Art Center as well as many others. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and multiple grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.
