Sarah Charlesworth: Doubleworld

Over the course of a thirty-five-year career, Conceptual artist and photographer Sarah Charlesworth (1947–2013) investigated pivotal questions about the role of images in our culture. Doubleworld will be the first major survey in New York of the artist’s work to date, encompassing an innovative career that played a crucial role in expanding the possibilities of photography and establishing the medium’s centrality to contemporary art. The exhibition will include over fifty works from a rich and diverse oeuvre that pioneered an approach to dissecting and manipulating public imagery and shattering photographic conventions.

Charlesworth‘s influential body of work deconstructed the conventions of photography and gave emphasis to the medium’s importance in mediating our perception of the world. Her practice straddled the bridge between the incisive rigor of 1970s Conceptual art and the illuminating image-play of the later-identified “Pictures Generation.” She was part of a group of artists working in New York in the 1980s, which included Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, and Laurie Simmons, among others, that probed the visual language of mass media and illuminated the imprint of ubiquitous images on our everyday lives.

The exhibition is curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Artistic Director, and Margot Norton, Associate Curator.