Sara VanDerBeek

Sara VanDerBeek (born 1976), is an American artist who lives and works in New York City. She is known for photographing sculptures and three-dimensional still-life assemblages of her own making, Her father, Stan VanDerBeek, was an experimental filmmaker. She moved to New York in 1994 to attend her father's alma mater, Cooper Union. The gallery closed in 2009. Work VanDerBeek is considered one of several contemporary photographers — among them Michele Abeles, Liz Deschenes and Eileen Quinlan — who are extending the innovations of the earlier Pictures Generation into new territory. Her work focuses on photographs of assemblages that she creates in her studio. Her work was included in "New Photography 2009" at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Curator Eva Respini, who put together the MoMA show, described VanDerBeek's art as having a hybrid nature: "Although Sara is a photographer, I like to think of her practice as multidisciplinary... [She is] very interested in the space of sculpture, the space of theater." She told Aperture's Brian Sholis in 2013, "I have always been interested in how photography affects the reading of scale, time, and place. It can be disorienting or confusing to encounter a photograph of something, but it can also usefully enlighten some little-perceived aspect of real-life experience." Since 2010, VanDerBeek's work has been shown in numerous solo exhibitions in galleries and museums throughout the U.S. and internationally.

Collections VanDerBeek's work is in the permanent collections: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Whitney Museum of American Art Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles Brooklyn Museum Cornell Fine Arts Museum