Sharon Core: 1606 to the Sixties

Sharon Core (American, b. 1965) interrogates the boundaries between painting and photography, or the handmade and mechanical sides of picture-making. Trained as both a photographer and painter, she problematizes longstanding associations linking photography to mechanical documentation of “the real” versus painting’s affiliations with individual inspiration and imagination. The results are photographs that are at once hyper-realistic and painterly, believable yet deceptive. 

Core’s photographic series 1606–1907 takes on a 300-year span of the European floral still life tradition. Core builds elaborate studio sets that meticulously reconstruct still life paintings by Rachel Ruysch, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Vincent van Gogh, and others, using period props she collects and heirloom varieties of flowers grown in her greenhouse. Also on view at The Hyde, her Early American series delves deeply into the still life motifs of the Early Republic and the paintings of Raphaelle Peale. Apples, peaches, tea cakes, tobacco plants, and watermelons appear alongside period porcelain and glass, awash in an uncanny chiaroscuro that intensifies Core’s pictorial investigations into production, imitation, realism, and artifice. Without any manipulation software, Core uses the most foundational of photographic tools, composition and lighting, to deconstruct art historical masterworks, then document their reconstruction in a kind of performance for the camera lens. 

In a separate gallery, Core shifts from pictorial study of nineteenth-century and earlier still life paintings to Pop Art classics of the 1960s. Core’s Thiebauds series, featuring cakes, pies and other common American foods, takes photographic reinvention of paintings to an even more specialized level, capturing the flat surfaces, skewed perspectives, and stark shadows of Wayne Thiebaud’s iconic food paintings with astonishing precision. Core’s Oldenburgs reinvent Claes Oldenburg’s rough-hewn plaster sculptures of burgers and ice cream. Her shift here from recreating paintings to recreating sculptures as two-dimensional pictures of sculptures further complicates questions of photographic representation within a larger tradition of art-making. 

Sharon Core received her BFA in painting from the University of Georgia and her MFA in photography from Yale University School of Art. Her work is in major public collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth; The Phillips Collection, Washington DC; The Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC; and the Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio. Her monograph, Early American, was published by Radius Books, Santa Fe in 2012. Core lives and works in Esopus, NY and is represented by Yancey Richardson Gallery, NY. 

The artist will give a gallery talk on Thurs., October 16, 2025, at 6pm. 

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