Sharon Core reverses the customary relationship between painting and photography: instead of making paintings from photographs, the artist constructs photographs from paintings. Her early series Drunks (1998–2000) employed the formal lighting and monochromatic backdrops of commercial portrait photography to capture subjects with unfocused eyes, tousled hair, and inebriated expressions. However, it was Core’s Theibaud series (2003–04) that first attracted major attention. For her photographic simulations of the iconic paintings of cakes, hotdogs, and sandwiches created by California artist Wayne Theibaud in the 1960s, she employed her training as both a painter and a pastry chef to recreate the scenes. Her subsequent series, Early American (2007–08), extended her playful manipulation of the properties intrinsic to painting and photography, object and subject, original and reproduction. For these recent photographs, Core meticulously recreated a number of still lifes by the 19th-century painter Raphaelle Peale by manipulating the surreally beautiful lighting and an assortment of objects ranging from flowers and fish to watermelons alongside genuine antique crockery and glassware. In both the Theibaud and Early American series, the subtle visual rifts between the original paintings and the photographs that utilize them as source material unearth the labor and complex issues behind the deceptively simple beauty of Core’s images.

Core has had solo exhibitions at White Columns in New York, Clementine Gallery in New York, Bellwether Gallery in Brooklyn, and Yancey Richardson Gallery in New York. Her work has also been included in the Armory Show in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Shanghai, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington DC.

Courtesy of the Guggenheim Museum