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Nyehaus is pleased to present an exhibition of selected works by Sherrie Levine. The exhibition is a survey of some of Levine’s most significant explorations of the re-contextualization and re-working of the found object, and her questioning of the authenticity and autonomy of the art object and its status as a commodity.
Beginning in the early 1970s with ‘Shoes’ (1972), and continuing through the 1980s and 1990s to the present with ‘Untitled (After Walker Evans)’ (1981), ‘Untitled (Lead Checks/Lead Chevron: 4)’ (1988), ‘Untitled (The Bachelors: Livreur de Grand Magasin’ (1989), ‘Fountain (After Marcel Duchamp)’ (1991), ‘Black Newborn’ (1995) and ‘Steer Skull, unhorned’ (2002) amongst others, the exhibition encompasses Levine’s deconstruction and reconstruction of the very nature of representation.
Levine’s artworks can only survive in the world of art. Although she dislikes the term ‘appropriation‘ and what that implies for an artist, Levine is known for appropriating the images of other artists, of taking them and reproducing them, sometimes almost exactly, and then exhibiting them as her own. Having absorbed Duchamp’s lessons, who by creating the readymade established the importance of context in the understanding of objects as art, Levine boldly selects, then undermines his and other prime examples of modernism (Brancusi, Malevich, Rodchenko, Schiele) and subverts their original artistic intention.
In the early 1970s, she toyed with the idea of the commercial element of art production by presenting 72 pairs of children’s shoes, polished and tied together, on tabletops in the store/gallery in California. These are the precursors of Levine’s later concern with repetition, duplication and restatement.
The prefix ‘After’ in her titles (‘After Walker Evans’ or ‘After Kasimir Malevich’ for example) literally re-presents the original idea and repeats its meaning, as a challenge to the concept of originality that is typified in the early work with the mass-produced shoes. Levine’s ‘Knot paintings’ on plywood in which the ‘eyes’ in the wood have been painted in various colors, allude to a negation of the act of painting. Her painted objects featuring checkers and backgammon game boards have a deliberately formal rigor that echoes the reductive strategies of minimalism.
Levine’s reference to Duchamp in particular is abundantly clear in her polished bronze urinal ‘Fountain (After Marcel Duchamp).’ Here she has chosen Duchamp’s most infamous readymade and, by casting a urinal similar to the one that Duchamp originally exhibited, but in gilded bronze, Levine shifts Duchamp’s original intention to subvert the value of art. This is achieved by including such an ordinary object into the canon, returning it to ‘high art’ status by using painstakingly polished gilded bronze, so that it takes on a completely different ‘other’ condition, that of the conventional, valued, artwork, and simultaneously references that other giant of modernism, Constantin Brancusi.
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