Sturtevant Exhibition

Matthew Marks Gallery 522 W 22nd St.

[Image: Sturtevant "Duchamp Man Ray Portrait" (1967) Gelatin silver print]

This event has ended.

Matthew Marks presents Sturtevant, the next exhibition in his gallery at 522 West 22nd Street. Including six works made between 1967 and 2010, the exhibition spans the artist’s career and highlights the depth of her pioneering vision.

The exhibition features Sturtevant’s repetitions of works by Robert Gober, Keith Haring, Jasper Johns, Man Ray, and Andy Warhol, as well as a 2010 video made towards the end of her life that utilizes video clips pulled from the internet.

In 1965, Sturtevant made a name for herself in the New York art world by “making her work the work of other artists,” as one critic noted at the time. Her versions of artworks by her male peers were often misinterpreted. Sturtevant was never interested in making perfect replicas or exact copies. Instead, she adopted style as her medium to disrupt and investigate the underlying structures of art: whether aesthetic, political, economic, or cultural. As she clarified in a 1971 letter:

The work cannot be treated in a material or non-intellectual way
I am not Anti-Art
I am not saying anyone can do it
I am not “poking fun at the artist”
I am not “reporting the current scene”
I am not in the process of celebrating process
I am not making copies
I am not making imitations
I am not interested in painting sculptures or objects
I am not interested in being a “Great Artist”
That’s real medieval thinking.

Sturtevant’s work received renewed attention in the mid-1980s when a younger generation of artists were engaging in appropriation. However, she maintained that her work was always centered on thinking rather than notions of authorship: “The appropriationists were really about the loss of originality and I was about the power of thought. A very big difference.”

Sturtevant (b. Lakewood, OH, 1924; d. Paris, 2014) was awarded the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011. Her work has been featured in numerous solo exhibitions, including at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2015); The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2014); MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2014); Serpentine Galleries, London (2013); Kunsthalle, Zürich (2012); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2012); and Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris (2010).