Levine, Sherrie

▪ American artist

born April 17, 1947, Hazelton, Pa., U.S.

      American conceptual artist known for remaking famous 20th-century works of art either through photographic reproductions (termed re-photography), drawing, watercolour, or sculpture. Her appropriations are conceptual gestures that question the Modernist myths of originality and authenticity. She held that the loss of authenticity in art was a result of the ubiquitous, mediated signs that defined contemporary reality and that it was impossible to create anything new.

      Levine grew up in the Midwest and attended the University of Wisconsin—Madison (B.A., 1969; M.F.A., 1973). She moved to New York City in 1975, and her earliest work—in collage—demonstrated a strong feminist leaning. In the early 1980s she began to be associated with a group of artists, including Jeff Koons (Koons, Jeff) and David Salle (Salle, David), who were interested in ready-made images and objects, and her work was included in some of the important early shows for this group. She began making photographic reproductions of images by such important American photographers as Edward Weston (Weston, Edward) and Walker Evans (Evans, Walker), among others. She made drawings after such artists as Willem de Kooning (de Kooning, Willem), Egon Schiele (Schiele, Egon), and Kazimir Malevich (Malevich, Kazimir) and watercolours after Piet Mondrian (Mondrian, Piet), Henri Matisse (Matisse, Henri), and Fernand Léger (Léger, Fernand). She deliberately chose artists with radically different styles, rendering them in a uniform format and thereby reducing the images to equivalent signs. In the mid-1980s she made two series of paintings based on the wood knot and the grid, provoking questions about the supposed unique style of modern abstraction. Her later works include reproductions of the two major 20th-century artists: Marcel Duchamp (Duchamp, Marcel)'s famous ready-made Fountain and Constantin Brancusi (Brancusi, Constantin)'s Newborn. Keeping faith with her earliest feminist concerns, Levine appropriated only the work of male artists as a means of “de-heroicizing” their patriarchal claim to the art historical canon.

Additional Reading

Daniela Salvioni, “The Transgressions of Sherrie Levine,” Parkett, 32:76–84 (June 1992); and Howard Singerman, “Seeing Sherrie Levine,” October, 67:78–107 (Winter 1994), are assessments. Among many exhibition catalogues are Sherrie Levine, New Photography (1996); and Ann Temkin, Sherrie Levine: Newborn (1993).

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