Winter Street Gallery is proud to present Sarah Charlesworth & Luke O'Halloran on view from July 9 to August 15, 2021. Bringing together these two artists – Charlesworth a key member of The Pictures Generation, and O'Halloran an emergent voice in contemporary painting – the exhibition explores illusionism and the sense of mystery inherent to their respective mediums, photography and painting. Alluding to magic and chance, Charlesworth and O'Halloran draw our attention to the chaos, beauty, and sense of hope contained in unpredictability.

 

O’Halloran’s series "Cards in the Air" portrays a burst of playing cards suspended mid-air and set in a deep blue field of gravity. In capturing an unrepeatable confluence of elements, O'Halloran pictures this swirling moment with a sense of unchanging suspense. The paintings themselves are nearly abstract or ornamental if it were not for their letters and numbers, brief moments of legibility amidst their flight and fall. 

 

In tandem with the oil paintings are two bodies of photographic work (created over a decade apart) by Sarah Charlesworth. The earliest, a large format black and white mural print, entitled Stone Tablet (1981, from the series "In-Photography") is an enlargement of a cut-up reproduction depicting an ancient relic. Two works from the series "Natural Magic" (1992-93) signal Charlesworth's radical eschewal of photographic appropriation in favor of staged images of occult devices. Isolating the viewer's attention towards these powerful objects, Charlesworth bestows secret truths and knowledge through universal image forms.

 

Writing in the April 2021 issue of ArtForum, artist Sam McKinniss observes, “O’Halloran seems to have inherited Charlesworth’s curiosity about metaphysics and optics, exploring their methods and veracity. The main difference is the generational chasm separating each artist’s cause for concern, but also that O’Halloran chooses to render and develop these interests using paint rather than by purely photographic means.”

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The work of Sarah Charlesworth (1947-2013) has been the subject of solo 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 including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

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Luke O’Halloran (b. 1991) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. O’Halloran received his BFA from The University of Colorado at Boulder. In 2020 O'Halloran had a solo exhibition at Kapp Kapp, New York and has participated in group exhibitions at Almine Rech, New York; Y2K Group, New York; and OCDchinatown, New York

 

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We thank Luke O'Halloran and The Estate of Sarah Charlesworth for their collaboration. We are especially grateful for the support of Lucy Poe, Nick Poe, and Matthew Lange of the Charlesworth estate and of Steve Henry of Paula Cooper Gallery. Thanks are also due to Sam McKinniss, Nate Freeman, Paul de Froment, Ethan Buchsbaum, and Daniel Kapp.