Installation view, “Sarah Charlesworth: Desire and Seduction,” Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, February 20– March 29, 2025. © The Estate of Sarah Charlesworth. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Photo: Steven Probert
A conceptual artist associated with the 1970s and ’80s art movement known as The Pictures Generation, a loose group of artists mining mass media for representational imagery that could be appropriated to make new work that critiqued the current culture, Sarah Charlesworth used photography to laconically re-present her times. Focusing on isolated imagery, which she sometimes repeated from different media sources and at other times captured on a related color field, she dealt with specific concerns in studied series, such as black and white newspaper photos of people jumping from buildings to commit suicide or escape fires and cutout color fragments from fashion magazines, porn publications, and ethnographic books. The exhibition “Desire and Seduction” explores how the groundbreaking artist, who died more than a decade ago, poetically employed signs and symbols to vividly capture the turn of the century zeitgeist.
–Paul Lester