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23/6/2015

Two Exhibitions

New Museum, New York

Sarah Charlesworth: Doubleworld
06/24/15 - 09/20/15
curated by Massimiliano Gioni and Margot Norton

Over the course of a forty-year career, artist Sarah Charlesworth (1947–2013) investigated pivotal questions about the role of images in our culture.

Her influential body of work deconstructed the conventions of photography and gave emphasis to the medium’s importance in mediating our perception of the world. Charlesworth’s practice straddled the bridge between the incisive rigor of 1970s Conceptual art and the illuminating image-play of the later-identified “Pictures Generation.” She was part of a group of artists working in New York in the 1980s, which included Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, and Laurie Simmons, among others, that probed the visual language of mass media and illuminated the imprint of ubiquitous images on our everyday lives.

This exhibition at the New Museum features Charlesworth’s poignant series “Stills” (1980), a group of fourteen large-scale works rephotographed from press images that hauntingly depict people falling or jumping off of buildings. The installation of “Stills” will mark the first time that the complete series has been displayed in New York and will be presented alongside other prominent works by the artist: her groundbreaking series “Modern History” (1977–79), which pioneered photographic appropriation; the alluring and exacting “Objects of Desire” (1983–88) and “Renaissance Paintings” (1991), which continued Charlesworth’s trenchant approach to mining the language of photography; “Doubleworld” (1995), which probes the fetishism of vision in premodern art when the field of photography was first becoming a mediator of representation and marks Charlesworth’s transition to a more active role behind the camera; and her radiant latest series, “Available Light” (2012). The title of the exhibition is taken from one of her photographs, Doubleworld (1995), from the series of the same name, which presents two nineteenth-century stereoscopic viewing devices, each holding a stereo-photograph depicting two women standing side by side. The continuous doubling of images in this work—and throughout Charlesworth’s oeuvre—underscores the duplicitous role of the photograph as an alternate, optical universe and a stand-in for the physical world.

“Sarah Charlesworth: Doubleworld” will be the first major survey in New York of the artist’s work to date, encompassing an innovative career that played a crucial role in expanding the possibilities of photography and establishing the medium’s centrality to contemporary art. Invested with rare precision and dedication, Charlesworth’s influential body of work and philosophy on art-making continue to reverberate and take on shifting significance with time as new technologies emerge and our inexhaustible reservoir of images expands with astonishing speed.

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Leonor Antunes: I Stand Like A Mirror Before You
06/24/15 - 09/06/15
curated by Helga Christoffersen

Portuguese artist Leonor Antunes (b. 1972) creates sculptures that reflect the environment that surrounds them and make reference to the work of lesser-known figures from the history of twentieth-century architecture and design.

Her interest in craft and handwork shines through in her use of wood, bamboo, leather, brass, rope, and string; these materials often find sculptural form as vertical or horizontal demarcations in space or as woven transparent nets and grids. “Leonor Antunes: I Stand Like A Mirror Before You” will be the artist’s first presentation in a New York institution and will include a body of new works made for the Museum’s Lobby Gallery. The exhibition reflects Antunes investment in a group of female artists and architects for whom New York became an important place for the production and presentation of their work. Working from measurements and proportions specific to the New Museum building, Antunes’s new sculptures refer to the vernacular principles that characterize the work of Swedish furniture designer and architect Greta Grossman. The installation also considers the American experimental filmmaker, choreographer, and writer Maya Deren’s thoughts on the transformative potential of cinema as a reflective surface. Antunes has created a densely choreographed series of hanging and standing works based on weavings by Anni Albers and Lenore Tawney that mirror one another and use the glass wall of the Lobby Gallery as a screen for reflection.

Image: Sarah Charlesworth, Still Life with Camera, 1995. Cibachrome prints with mahogany frame.

Press Contact:
Gabriel Einsohn, press@newmuseum.org

Opening: Tue 24th June 2015

New Museum
235 Bowery, New York
Wed 11am to 6pm
Thu 11am to 9pm
Fri - Sun 11am to 6pm

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