NEW YORK, NY.- Sarah Charlesworth (1947–2013) is known for her conceptually driven and visually alluring photo-based works that subvert and deconstruct cultural imagery. Entitled Desire and Seduction, the current exhibition examines how these themes emerged and recurred within Charlesworth’s work from the early 1980s through the mid-2000s. Populated with fetish objects and silken fabrics, isolated body parts and masked strangers, the exhibition invites the viewer to locate their own desire.

Beginning with her celebrated Objects of Desire series (1983–88), Charlesworth sought to make visible the “shape of desire.”[1] Meticulously excising images from a range of sources—including fashion magazines, pornography, and archeological textbooks—she then re-photographed the cutouts against fields of pure color. In each work, Charlesworth has paired the image with a signifying color: red (sexual passion), black (dominance or death), green (natural growth), yellow (material value), blue (spiritual or metaphorical desire). The prints are enclosed within coordinated lacquered wood frames and either stand alone or are combined in diptychs and triptychs.

The earliest works in the exhibition address sexuality through gender stereotypes, such as the toned male torso outlined in clinging wet fabric in White T-Shirt (1983), a sweep of voluminous locks in Blonde (1983–84) and the anonymous wedding dress in Bride (1983–84). Charlesworth disrupts the viewer’s expectations in Red Mask (1983) with an image of an onnagata Kabuki actor playing the role of a geisha. In the two-part work Figures (1983), a silk evening gown is juxtaposed with a satin bondage suit on black and red backgrounds, intertwining dominance, power and passion.

Both the finesse of Charlesworth’s seductive Cibachrome prints and her fascination with the iconography of desire were expanded in subsequent series, which often employed familiar motifs. Maintaining a focus on isolated images in saturated fields of color, from 1992 onwards Charlesworth’s photographs were composed and produced in her studio using the camera as a tool to conjure fantasies of her own imagination. For example, the cut-out image of an elusive Red Scarf from 1983 reappeared wrapped around a pair of heads in Red Veils (1992–93), and a thick red curtain is parted to make room for a telescope’s shaft in Untitled (Voyeur) (1995). In Pleasure of the Text (1992–93) Charlesworth invokes the use of silk in magic tricks by concealing an open book beneath a luxurious white scarf and suspending the composition against a black background. Presenting mysterious scenes imbued with unresolved intrigue, these works incite desire for the impossible.

Sarah Charlesworth (1947-2013) has been the subject of one-person exhibitions at a number of institutions including the major survey, “Sarah Charlesworth: Doubleworld,” at the New Museum, New York (2015), which traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2017); and a retrospective organized by SITE Santa Fe (1997), which traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (1998), the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC (1998), and the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art (1999). Her work is in important public collections such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Charlesworth taught photography for many years at the School of Visual Arts, New York; the Rhode Island School of Design; and Princeton University.

[1] Sarah Charlesworth interviewed by Susan Fisher Sterling, March 23, 1997, in Sarah Charlesworth, SITE Santa Fe, 1997, p. 80