Kirjahaku

Texts-including essays, reviews, and statements by the artist-on the work of Sherrie Levine.The artist Sherrie Levine (b. 1947) is best known for her appropriations of work by other artists-most famously for her rephotographs of canonical images by Edward Weston, Eliot Porter, and other masters of modern photography. Since those works of the early 1980s, she has continued to work on and "after" artists whose names have come to define modernism, making sculpture after Brancusi and Duchamp, paintings after Malevich and Blinky Palermo, watercolors after Matisse and Miro, photographs after Monet and Cezanne as well as Alfred Stieglitz. Throughout, Levine's practice effectively uncompleted, decentered, and extended works of art that were once singular and finished, posing critical rebuttals to some of the basic assumptions of modernist aesthetics. Her work was central to the theorization of postmodernism in the visual arts-most notably as it emerged in the pages of October magazine. It challenged authorial sovereignty and aesthetic autonomy and invited readings that opened onto gender, history, and the economic and discursive processes of the art world. This collection gathers writings on Levine from art magazines, exhibition catalogs, and academic journals, spanning much of her career. The volume begins with texts by Douglas Crimp, Rosalind Krauss, and Craig Owens that situate Levine in postmodernist discourse and link her early work to October. The essays that follow draw on these first critical forays and complicate them, at once deepening and resisting them, as Levine's own work has done. All the essays attempt to understand the relationship between Levine and the artists she cites and the objects that she recasts. In these pages, Levine's oddly doubled works appear as chimeras, taxidermy, fandom, pratfalls, even Poussin's Blind Orion.ContributorsMichel Assenmaker, Douglas Crimp, Erich Franz, Catherine Ingraham, David Joselit, Susan Kandel, Rosalind Krauss, Sylvia Lavin, Sherrie Levine, Maria Loh, Stephen Melville, Craig Owens, Howard Singerman

The American artist Sherrie Levine realises in her works the artistic praxis of appropriating, repeating and varying famous earlier artworks. At the same time in doing so she creates her own new oeuvre. Beyond the mere copy she further develops the works c onceptually and with historical clichés, presenting it to the viewer for reconsideration. Sherrie Levine (* 1947) is a photographer, painter and sculptor and is celebrated above all in the United States. When we fi rst consider her works we think of the im itation and interpretation of the reference works, but our conclusions about the copy soon disappear in favour of a new, autonomous original. The volume shows over 50 works “after” artists like Duchamp, Cézanne, Degas, van Gogh and Mondrian, from whose mas terpieces Sherrie Levine has created something new. In addition art experts place her work in context, for example with regard to her choice of subject or her methods of reproduction.

The renowned American artist Sherrie Levine engages her ongoing practice of appropriating artworks from the Western art historical canon—this time taking Ad Reinhardt’s Blue Paintings as a point of departure.Monochromes After Reinhardt: 1–28 (2018) continues the artist’s ongoing investigation of color separated from its representational function. Inspired by the exhibition Ad Reinhardt: Blue Paintings held at David Zwirner, New York in 2017, Levine has created abstract restatements of the 28 works that were on view, making use of pixilation to consolidate the range of blue tones in each painting into a single, truly monochromatic value. This work revisits a technique first employed by Levine in her 1989 group of woodcut prints Meltdown, where an averaging algorithm was used to create a checkerboard composition based on modernist artists’ iconic paintings.Sherrie Levine: After Reinhardt is published on the occasion of Levine’s eponymous solo exhibition at David Zwirner’s Upper East Side location in New York in 2019. The publication features full color reproductions of Monochromes After Reinhardt: 1–28 and includes the 1965 text “Reinhardt Paints a Picture,” in which Reinhardt famously interviewed himself.

The latest in the Spotlight Series, which focuses on new bodies of work by contemporary artists, Sherrie Levine: Hong Kong Dominoes showcases several series that distinctly engage the artist’s ongoing inquiry into notions of authorship, originality, and authenticity. Many of the works are consistent with Levine’s practice—the deliberate reproduction of other artists’ works and styles, so that her work and the original are nearly indistinguishable (as with the After Henri Matisse (1985) and After Feininger (2021) series). A number of the works make reference to modernist masterpieces, questioning the stereotypical construct of the heroic male artist. In her Monochromes After Renoir Nudes (2016) series, Levine used a computer program to calculate the average tone of the nude figures in Renoir’s paintings and then used this color to create monochrome panels. Published for the first time, Hong Kong Dominoes: 1–12 (2017) replicates the patterns of a set of dominoes that Levine purchased in Hong Kong, evoking both minimalist art and popular games. The catalogue also features a new essay by Larry List, which tracks the history of Levine’s inspirations and artistic practice, and an interview with Levine by Jeanne Siegel, originally published in the June/ Summer 1985 issue of Arts Magazine, which explores the artist’s use of appropriated imagery.

This book examines the career of New York-based artist Sherrie Levine, whose 1981 series of photographs "after Walker Evans" - taken not from life but from Evans's famous depression-era documents of rural Alabama - became central examples in theorizing postmodernism in the visual arts in the 1980s. For the first in-depth examination of Levine, Howard Singerman surveys a wide variety of sources, both historical and theoretical, to assess an artist whose work was understood from the outset to challenge both the label "artist" and the idea of oeuvre - and who has over the past three decades crafted a significant oeuvre of her own. Singerman addresses Levine's work after Evans, Brancusi, Malevich, and others as an experimental art historical practice - material reenactments of the way the work of art history is always doubled in and structured by language, and of the ways the art itself resists.