Eve Sonneman

Biography

Since the launch of her career in the Young Photographers exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1971, Eve Sonneman has secured a unique position for herself in the world of contemporary art. Internationally renowned as a photographer, she has participated in the 1977 Documenta and in the biennales of Venice, Paris, Strasbourg, and Australia, has published five books, and has been the subject of 77 solo exhibitions. In her own words, quoted by poet David Shapiro in the catalogue of her mid-career retrospective at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in 1980, her photography responds to "gesture and innuendo and small changes." To Shapiro, "She is a painterly photographer [who] reminds us that photography, as with Man Ray and Rodchenko, must never be denigrated as mere materiality."

In addition to her career in photography, Sonneman works in paint, making large abstractions, watercolors, and painted objects. Her distinctive, highly personal form of pointillism has been acutely characterized by the critic Klaus Kertess as "teeming with tiny, obsessively made, evanescent rings congealing into a delicate and fugitive, floreate dew."

Eve Sonneman is represented in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Art Institute of Chicago, and over 30 other museums around the world. Earlier in her career Sonneman was with Leo Castelli for fourteen years, and now she is represented by Nohra Haime Gallery in New York.