Press release

Baldwin Gallery is very sad to report the loss of a good friend: Sarah Charlesworth. We are very proud of our work with Sarah, and have considered her to be one of contemporary photography’s both most technically adept, and extraordinarily-visioned, artists. For me, her work has always demonstrated a formal elegance that for all its austerity did still illuminate at its spiritual edge the beauty and purity of the scientific properties of light and form in our universe.

—Kiki J. Raj, Director

The Baldwin Gallery is pleased to present its fifth show by internationally acclaimed artist Sarah Charlesworth. Light, in both a physical and metaphysical sense, is at the center of this new body of work from Sarah Charlesworth. Making use of a crystal ball, an assortment of prisms, and other optical instruments, Charlesworth engages the play of light from her studio window as it reflects and refracts to conjure a mysterious animated presence. At various turns our expectations are questioned and confounded by optical inversions and visual illusions. Composed images of spectral phenomena are shown side by side with documentary style images of the studio. Props arrayed on a desk and studio materials leaning against a wall hint at the show in progress. Individually and as a group these images lay bare the act of photography as they simultaneously mask and unmask the conditions of their creation. As test shots pinned to the wall mature into finished works, there is no neutral or objective point of closure, only the shifting perspectives of the observer and the observed. The making and the taking of a photograph is indistinguishable as each work celebrates the act of seeing.

Born in 1947, Sarah Charlesworth graduated from Barnard College in 1969, and currently resides in New York City. Charlesworth has had over 50 one-person exhibitions. Her work appears in museum collections throughout the world including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, the Boston Museum of Fine Art, MOCA, Los Angeles, the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London and the Stedelijk Museum, Eindhoven among others. Charlesworth is the recipient of two National Endowment Grants and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She teaches photography at the Lewis Center for Visual Art at Princeton University.

Also showing at the Baldwin Gallery, for the third time, is New York artist Stephen Dean. In this work, Dean continues to pursue structures and patterns of color. Dean is known for engaging color; color relationships, both visual and textual, are perhaps the primary theme of his work. For a number of years, he has extracted colors from familiar objects and scrambled their formal relationships, using watercolors to turn want ads into Delaunay-like color grids, and cutting and sewing flags into mural-sized De Stijl-style banners. Similarly, he transformed through video a range of public celebrations, from Brazilian soccer matches, Hindu rituals to American demolition derbies. Either extracted from their basic formal structures or the culture they come from, his subjects depart from everyday systems of organizations.

Stephen Dean was born in 1968. He currently lives and works in New York. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art exhibited his work in 2008, in a two-person show titled ‘Double Vision’. In 2006 he exhibited at the Site Santa Fe Biennial, and the Miami Art Museum. His work was included in the 51st Venice Biennial (2005). In 2004 he was awarded the Franco-Spanish Prix Altadis. His work is held in many private, corporate, and public collections, including: the Guggenheim Museum; the Whitney Museum; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; Yale University Art Gallery; Israel Museum, Tel Aviv; the Fonds National d’Art Contemporain; La Caixa, Barcelona; and the Progressive Corporation.

Images are available upon request. Please call 970.920.9797 for further information.