Elaine Sturtevant began “repeating” the works of her contemporaries in 1964, using some of the most iconic artworks of her generation as a source and catalyst for the exploration of originality, authorship, and the interior structures of art and image culture.
This exhibition is the first survey in America of Sturtevant’s 50-year career. It offers a historical overview of the work of the artist, from key pieces until recent videos.
Though her work of the 1960s and 1970s may appear to be simply mimetic exercises in proto-appropriation, Sturtevant is better understood as an artist who adopted style as her medium and took the art of her time as a loose “score” to be enacted. Far more than copies, her versions of Johns’s flags, Warhol’s flowers, and Joseph Beuys’s fat chairs are studies in the action of art that expose aspects of its making, circulation, and canonization.
Until February 22nd, 2015
MoMA – 11 West 23rd Street – New York