Sarah Charlesworth: selected works 1978 - 2009

Galerie Tanit is pleased to present a selection of works by American artist Sarah Charlesworth in her first exhibition in Munich.

Charlesworth is a visual artist and photographer who has exhibited widely in the US and abroad. With over fifty individual exhibitions and presence in major museum shows and collections, Charlesworth is one of the seminal artists whose work has been instrumental in bridging the gap between fine art and a critical practice of photography. Sarah Charlesworth’s work as a whole concerns the language of photography within contemporary culture and the selected works from these series highlight some of her concerns.

For her exhibition selected works 1978-2009 the Galerie Tanit will be showing a selection of works from each of four different series: Modern History, 1977-1979, Figure Drawings, conceived in 1988 and produced in 2008, Neverland, 2002, and Work in Progress, 2009.

Modern History, 1977-1979, is a series which explores the politics of representation as it is played out in newspapers from around the world. Individual works from this series concern the ways in which images orient us to ongoing world events.

Figure Drawings is an installation work originally conceived in 1988, completed and produced in 2008. This work is comprised of 40 individually framed images of the human figure, drawn from a variety of public sources, particularly monuments and iconic statuary. Ranging from ancient to contemporary, these figures - gesturing, marching, dancing, fighting - become a kind of map of human endeavor. Installed from floor to ceiling, archetypes of power and invisibility interact to describe a cosmology of human self-image and social value.

In the Neverland series, 2002, color photographs of highly abstracted objects explore the boundaries between image and symbol.

Work in Progress is a recent series in which Charlesworth turns the camera on her own working process collapsing the distinction between the image and the tools through which it is made. Shooting into the window of her studio, Charlesworth photographs the light as it illuminates her camera and working process.

Charlesworth’s work was currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in an exhibition entitled The Pictures Generation, 1974-1984, in Printed Matter at the Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, as well as, Images and (Re)presentations at Le Magasin, Centre National d’Art Contemporain in Grenoble, France. Her work is included in numerous public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, as well as, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, Netherlands.

Sarah Charlesworth
selected works 1978 - 2009