Collection: Sarah Charlesworth

Sarah Charlesworth (1947–2013) was an American conceptual artist and photographer whose practice interrogated the systems through which images produce meaning, authority, and desire. A founding member of the journal The Fox alongside Joseph Kosuth and Art & Language, she was a central figure in the Pictures Generation — the loose grouping of artists who, from the late 1970s onward, worked with appropriated images to expose the ideological structures embedded in mass media, advertising, and institutional representation.

Her work consistently asked what an image does rather than what it depicts: how photographs circulate, what they authorise, and what they conceal. This question — of orientation, access, and position within a system — was already present in her early collaborative work with Joseph Kosuth and Anthony McCall as International Local, including A che punto sei? / Where Are You Standing?, originally produced for the 37th Venice Biennale in 1976 and re-presented in Venice in 2026.

The materials gathered here are printed documents of that practice and its institutional reception — objects that record the points at which Charlesworth’s questions about images entered circulation as printed form.