Collection: Sharon Core

(b. 1965)

Photographer Sharon Core is known for her precise recreations of famous still-life paintings. First gaining recognition for her Thiebaud series, she recreated the Bay Area artist’s still-lifes of cake, pie, candy and other sweets, restaging each composition by meticulously baking and icing the confections from his paintings. In so doing, Core brought to life subject matter that was previously said to have only been painted from memory, thus expanding the prevailing rhetoric within the genre of the still life.

In her subsequent series Early American, Sharon Core has recreated the work of 19th century painter Raphaelle Peale. In these photographs, Core has arranged still lifes of flowers, fruits, vegetables and fish, manipulating the lighting and the camera in order to achieve the delicate highlights and sensitive colors in Peale’s paintings. The depiction of flowers in bloom and ripened fruit have traditionally alluded to notions of mortality, revealing life at its most bountiful but also right before the onset of decay. By introducing the camera to the age-old discourse, Sharon Core reconsiders these qualities of life and the course of time, reality and authenticity.

Core received a BFA from the University of Georgia in 1987 and an MFA from the Yale University School of Art in 1998, where she was awarded the George Sakier Memorial Prize for Excellence in Photography. Currently she lives and works in Brooklyn New York.

SELECTED PUBLIC COLLECTIONS

Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, TX

Cleveland Museum of Art, OH

Columbus Museum, Columbus, GA

Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY