Sarah Charlesworth
Biography
Sarah Charlesworth was born in 1947 in New Jersey, and passed away in 2013 at Falls Village in Connecticut. She is best known as an established figure of the Pictures Generation, as well as a prominent conceptual photographer of the 1970s and 1980s.
Charlesworth’s influential body of work deconstructs the conventions of photography and
establishes the medium’s centrality in our perception of the world. Charlesworth stages
volatile worlds, isolating objects on monochrome backgrounds to reveal the constructed
nature of visual culture and question systems of image distribution.She graduated in 1969 from the Barnard College in New York. During her life, she taught photography for many years at the School of Visual Arts in New York and also at the Rhode Island School of Design and at Princeton University.
Charlesworth has participated in solo exhibitions at various institutions, most recently in 2023 at Karma in Los Angeles (Neverland).In 2021, her work was presented at Paula Cooper Gallery in New York, in 2020 Sarah Charlesworth: Image Language, curated by Christine Robinson at Printed Matter in New
York, in 2019 In-Photography at Paula Cooper Gallery in New York, in 2018 The Small Versions at Krakow-Witkin Gallery in Boston, in 2017 Doubleworld at LACMA in Los Angeles, in 2016 Selected by Liz Deschenes at Campoli Presti in Paris, in 2015 Sarah Charlesworth: Doubleworld, curated by Massimiliano Gioni and Margot Norton at the New Museum in New York, in 2014 Stills, curated by Matthew S. Witkovsky, at the The Art Institute of Chicago, in 2013 Available Light at Baldwin Gallery in Aspen, in 2012 Available Light at Susan Inglett Gallery in New York, in 2010 Work in Progress at Baldwin Gallery in Aspen.
Her work has been featured in several group shows, with the most recent being:Vicolo della Penitenza 11/A, MACRO-Museum of Contemporary Art, Rome (2023); The Artist’s Eye: Tammy Rae Carland, David Huffman, Lava Thomas, John Zurier, Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley (2022); Off The Record, Guggenheim Museum, New-York (2021); American Art 1961-2001, Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi (2021); Pictures Revisited, Metropolitan Museum (2020); Brand New: Art and Commodity in the 1980s, Hirshhorn Museum (2018); Recto Verso, Fondazione Prada (2015); the 77th Whitney Biennial, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2014); Shock of the News, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (2012); Signs of a Struggle: Photography in the Wake of Postmodernism, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2011); September 11, the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2011); The Last Newspaper, the New Museum, New York (2010); The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2009); and The Last Picture Show: Artists Using Photography 1960-1982, the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2004).
