Sarah Charlesworth | Figures | 1983 08.04. – 14.05.2017 | Fotomuseum Winterthur

SITUATION #73

Figures, diptych, 2 cibachrome prints, 1983 © Sarah Charlesworth
Sarah Charlesworth, Figures, 1983, SITUATION #73, SITUATIONS/Placeholder, installation view at Fotomuseum Winterthur, 2017 © Philipp Ottendörfer

Sarah Charlesworth’s series “Objects of Desire” was created in the early 1980s in the context of the Pictures Generation, a group of young artists who used radical gestures to cast off visual arts’ adoption of modernist traditions, and who challenged established roles and clichés by the appropriation of media images. Figures deconstructs the iconography of different types of visual tropes. A silky, elegantly draped evening dress is set against the ambivalent, deliberately overt image of a bound and mummified figure. One section is mounted upon the other, the dark half spatially overlaying the vivid red side. By emphatically presenting photography itself as an object, Charlesworth exposes the work to a new interpretative vigour.


More by Sarah Charlesworth: sarahcharlesworth.net