Background
Sherrie Levine was born on April 17, 1947 in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, United States.
painter Photographer conceptual artist
Sherrie Levine was born on April 17, 1947 in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, United States.
Sherrie Levine received her B.A. from the University of Wisconsin in Madison in 1969. In 1973 she earned her M.F.A. from the same institution.
During and after college, Levine worked various jobs in commercial art to earn money, and in 1973 Levine moved to Berkeley, California, where she taught art at various venues throughout the Bay Area.
Much of Levine's work is explicitly appropriated from recognizable modernist artworks by artists such as Walker Evans, Edgar Degas, Marcel Duchamp, and Constantin Brancusi.
Levine participated in the exhibition "Pictures" at Artists Space in New York in 1977, curated by Douglas Crimp.
Levine has rephotographed a number of works by other artists, including Eliot Porter and Edward Weston. Moreover, her series of photographs "After Walker Evans" was shown at her 1981 solo exhibition at Metro Pictures Gallery in New York.
Levine worked with Mary Boone Gallery in New York between 1987 and 2015.
Additional examples of Levine's works include photographs of Van Gogh paintings from a book of his work; watercolor paintings based directly on work by Fernand Léger; pieces of plywood with their knotholes painted bright solid colors; and her 1991 sculpture "Fountain", a bronze urinal modeled after Marcel Duchamp's 1917 work "Fountain".
In 1993 Levine created cast glass copies of sculptures by Constantin Brancusi, held in the permanent collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, for an exhibition titled Museum Studies.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art held an exhibition in 2009, titled "The Pictures Generation", which featured Levine's works. Besides, in November 2011, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York mounted a survey exhibition of Levine's career titled Mayhem.
During the winter of 2016, Levine exhibited new work of monochrome paintings paired with refrigerators at David Zwirner Gallery.
In 2016-2017 Levine exhibited at Neues Museum Nürnberg: "After All". Her second exhibition with David Zwirner (London, United Kingdom) took place in 2017, entitled "Pie Town". In 2018 Levine is going to exhibit for the first time with Xavier Hufkens in Brussels.
Currently, Levine lives and works between New York, United States, and Santa Fe, New Mexico, United States.
Sherrie Levine is best known for her reproductions of significant male artists' works through the medium of photography and sculpture, so as to discuss notions of authenticity and originality. Moreover, she is best known for her series of photographs "After Walker Evans".
Her work is in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and The Museum of Modern Art in New York, among others.
Levine's art is most often associated with 1980's theoretical feminism. Three paintings from Levine's series "After Ernst Ludwig Kirchner" were included in the exhibit "Difference: On Representation and Sexuality" in 1984. Her appropriations of male artists' famous works combined with her intentional re-feminizing brings attention to the "difference problem" which this exhibit was focused on.
Levine's interests are especially focused on the intersection of gender politics and artistic representation, exploring the biases inherent to art history and the art market that historically favors white, heteronormative males from Western countries. Consequently, her work has inspired newer generations of artists who are concerned both with issues of authorship and identity politics. Artists who have been marginalized to some extent because of their gender, sexual orientation or ethnicity have found inspiration in Levine's reclamation of objects from the power structures to which they belonged.
Quotations:
“The world is filled to suffocating. Every word, every image, is leased and mortgaged. We know what a picture is but a space in which a variety of images, none of them original, blend and clash.”
“I want to put a picture on top of a picture. This makes for times when both disappear and other times when they’re both visible.”
Quotes from others about the person
Donald Barthelme: "Sherrie Levine is an artist for a dreadfully confused time."
