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

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.