Like her better-known colleagues Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince Sarah Charlesworth (1947–2013) was a key member of the Pictures Generation. Like them, she emerged in the late 1970s to dissect the workings of images—photographs, in particular—within popular culture.
This small but punchy retrospective—astoundingly, her first in New York—opens with a room of her early “Stills,” a series of large, cropped and grainy blowups of newspaper photos, capturing people falling from buildings. The serial arrangement of these shocking pictures into a dispassionate typology reveal roots in ’60s and ’70s Conceptual Art, but their charged emotional content and interest in the conventions of media representation mark them as harbingers of Postmodernism. The artist’s best known series, “Objects of Desire” from the mid-1980s, isolates found images against glossy monochromatic backgrounds with matching frames. One diptych, Figures, pairs a bodiless 1940s evening gown with a prone woman mummified in S&M bondage gear, creating a concise feminist critique of Hollywood glamor and fetishism.
In later years, Charlesworth began taking her own photos, with arguably even more incisive results. Untitled (Voyeur), from the 1995 series “Doubleworld,” pictures a phallic brass telescope gently penetrating a pair of slightly parted red velvet drapes: a history of vision and optics recast as a wryly gendered send-up.
Her last works, the 2012 “Available Light” series, present spare, limpid still lifes on the theme of reflection and refraction, as well as a carefully staged, hauntingly luminous shot of her studio. Like the artist’s career, this compelling survey feels unjustly abbreviated. In life as in art, Charlesworth left us wanting more.—Joseph R. Wolin