Sarah Charlesworth

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 had several solo exhibitions, most recently Neverland at Karma in Los Angeles (2023); Modern History at Paula Cooper Gallery in New York (2021); Sarah Charlesworth: Image Language, curated by Christine Robinson at Printed Matter in New York (2020); In-Photography at Paula Cooper Gallery in New York (2019); The Small Versions at Krakow-Witkin Gallery in Boston (2018); Doubleworld at LACMA in Los Angeles (2017); Selected by Liz Deschenes at Campoli Presti in Paris (2016); Sarah Charlesworth: Doubleworld, curated by Massimiliano Gioni and Margot Norton at the New Museum in New York 5); Stills, curated by Matthew S. Witkovsky, at the The Art Institute of Chicago (2014); Available Light at Baldwin Gallery in Aspen (2013); Available Light at Susan Inglett Gallery in New York (2012); Work in Progress at Baldwin Gallery in Aspen (2010).

Her work has been featured in several group shows including the current To Exalt The Ephemeral: The (Im)permanent Collection at BAMPFA in Berkley (2024/2025); Tabula Rasa at Paul Cooper Gallery in New York (2024); Vicolo della Penitenza 11/A, MACRO-Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome (2023); The Artist’s Eye: Tammy Rae Carland, David Huffman, Lava Thomas, John Zurier at Berkeley Art Museum in Berkeley (2022); Off The Record at Guggenheim Museum in New-York (2021); American Art 1961-2001 at Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi (2021); Pictures Revisited at Metropolitan Museum in New York (2020); Brand New: Art and Commodity in the 1980s at Hirshhorn Museum in Washington(2018); Recto Verso at Fondazione Prada in Milan (2015); the 77th Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (2014); Shock of the News at National Gallery of Art in Washington (2012); Signs of a Struggle: Photography in the Wake of Postmodernism at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (2011); September 11 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2011); The Last Newspaper at the New Museum in New York (2010); The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (2009); The Last Picture Show: Artists Using Photography 1960-1982 at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (2004).