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Art Institute of Chicago

Separation, from the series "Renaissance Paintings and Drawings" (1991)

Sarah Charlesworth

1991

Attribution
Sarah Charlesworth American, 1947-2013
Medium
Silver dye-bleach prints (2), lacquered wood
Physical dimensions
Each image: 131.4 × 47.2 cm (51 3/4 × 18 5/8 in.); each frame: 143 × 59 cm (56 5/16 × 23 1/4 in.); overall: 143 × 122 cm (56 5/16 × 48 1/16 in.)
Credit line
Purchased with funds provided by Elena Urschel
CATALOGUE RECORD

Museum metadata is available under CC0. Image availability and rights are separate; consult the source record.

Source rights statement: © The Estate of Sarah Charlesworth.

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From the museum

For the series “Renaissance Paintings and Drawings”, Sarah Charlesworth trained her attention on Western high art at a time when she was also studying psychoanalytic readings of art and literature. Here she isolated a detail from the painting “The Mystical Nativity” (1500–1501) by Sandro Botticelli, in which an angel and a man embrace at the event of Jesus’s birth. In Charlesworth’s doubled separation, figures are not only removed from the original painting but also parted from each other across the two planes of a diptych. One could imagine the separation anxiety of a child weaned from his or her mother, as well as the particular future that awaits Christ, first death and then resurrection.

Description: Art Institute of Chicago · CC BY 4.0

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