Work

Four bodies of work

Photography and painting have run side by side through Sonneman's career. The series below are a selection; the complete record is being assembled in the Archive Project.

“Sensitivity to each medium is Sonneman's glory. She responds with a vision as much as a touch specific to her chosen means.”
David Cohen

1970s to present

Diptychs

Two frames of the same subject, made moments apart, hung side by side. The diptychs have been Sonneman's signature form since the early 1970s: they hold two instants of ordinary time next to each other and let the small change between them carry the picture.

15 works

1980s to 1990s

Sonnegrams

Large Polaroid works in which dancers, swimmers and athletes are superimposed on NASA photographs of planets and their moons, made with a process Sonneman developed in the Polaroid studio. The name answers Man Ray's Rayogram and honors her father, the inventor Eric Sonneman.

14 works

1980s to present

Paintings

Oils worked slowly over months: fields of small rings and cells of pure color that the eye assembles. The critic Klaus Kertess described them as "teeming with tiny, obsessively made, evanescent rings congealing into a delicate and fugitive, floreate dew."

8 works

1980s to present

Watercolors

Made daily, often on the terrace of her New York studio, the watercolors carry the same orbs and rings as the oils but use the transparency and chance of the medium. A selection was published as 19 Watercolors (F Magazine, 2022).

6 works