Sherrie Levine's (b. 1947) work engages many of the core tenets of postmodern art, in particular challenging notions of originality, authenticity, and identity. Levine rose to prominence as a member of the Pictures Generation, a group of artists based in New York in the late 1970s and 1980s whose work examined the structures of signification underlying mass-circulated images, and, in many cases, directly appropriated these images in order to imbue them with new, critically inflected meaning. Since then, Levine has created a singular and complex body of work in a variety of media that often explicitly reproduces artworks and motifs from the Western art-historical canon as well as non-Western cultures.
Born in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, Levine studied at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where she received her M.F.A. in 1973. Early solo exhibitions were held at 3 Mercer Street, New York (1977); Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, Buffalo (1978); and The Kitchen, New York (1979).
In 2011, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York presented SHERRIE LEVINE: MAYHEM, a major exhibition of Levine’s work spanning three decades. The show included one of her most acclaimed series from 1981—a group of twenty-two photographs of reproductions of Walker Evans’s photographs from his Farm Security Administration-commissioned project to document the rural South during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Referencing the loss of uniqueness as a result of mechanical (and digital) reproduction, and ironically using a medium generally held responsible for diminishing the value of the artist’s hand, After Walker Evans: 1–22 emphasizes a description of the pictures in contextual, rather than formal terms.
Levine’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at prominent institutions worldwide, including at Neues Museum, State Museum for Art and Design in Nuremberg (2016); Portland Art Museum, Oregon (2013); Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld, Germany (2010); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2009 and 1991); and the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, New Mexico (2007). Other venues include Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen, Germany (1998); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Menil Collection, Houston (both 1995); Portikus, Frankfurt (1994); Philadelphia Museum of Art (1993); Kunsthalle Zürich (1991); High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC (both 1988); and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut (1987).
Levine’s work has been represented by David Zwirner since 2015. Her inaugural solo exhibition with the gallery was on view in New York the following year. In 2017, Sherrie Levine: Pie Town was presented at the gallery’s London location. Sherrie Levine: After Reinhardt, the artist’s third solo exhibition with David Zwirner, was on view in 2019 at the gallery’s East 69th Street location. In 2021, Sherrie Levine: Hong Kong Dominoes was presented at David Zwirner, Hong Kong. A solo presentation of the artist’s work was on view at David Zwirner, Paris, in the Spring of 2023. A concurrent presentation entitled Sherrie Levine: Wood was also on view at the gallery’s East 69th Street location in New York. Levine lives and works in New York.
Work by the artist is held in major international museum collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The National Museum of Art, Osaka; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate, United Kingdom; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
July 10–October 31, 2022
The Double: Identity and Difference in Art since 1900 (2022) is the first major exhibition to consider how and why artists have employed doubled formats to explore perceptual, conceptual, and psychological themes. Presenting more than one hundred and twenty works made from the beginning of the twentieth century to today, this expansive show is organized into four parts: seeing double; reversal; dilemma structures; and the doubled and divided self. Artists in the exhibition explore questions of identity and difference—the difference between the original work and a copy, the identity of the art with the artist, and especially self-identity as defined by our own unconscious, by society, as well as by race, gender, sexuality, and other forms of differentiation.
In a review of the show, Blake Gopnik for the New York Times wrote, “The 101 modern and contemporary artists in ‘The Double’ prove the vital mental impact of twoness. Come at this exhibition in Washington, D.C., from either end, and at its more than 120 works from any number of angles, and you’ll be convinced that doubling—sameness, but also the difference it’s in tension with—is a basic feature of the art of our times, and also one of its most compelling subjects.”
Learn more at the National Gallery of Art.
September 4–December 18, 2022
Objects of Desire: Photography and the Language of Advertising (2022) explores the often mercurial relationship between art and advertisement. The exhibition traces the evolution of this dialogue through decades of artistic manipulation of advertisement’s power visual lexicon. Since the 1970s, creative innovations led to dramatic shifts in the possibilities for photography as artistic expression, as photo-based artists reworked advertising strategies to challenge the increased commodification of daily life and later to appropriate the command these images have over the viewer/consumer. As the branding strategies of marketers shift, so too do the visual tactics of artists responding to the pervasive world of advertisements. By exploiting advertising’s visual vocabulary and adopting its sites and formats, and through re-photography, appropriation, and simulation, artists create a shared photographic language that puts the onus on the viewer to determine what precisely these pictures are asking of us.
The exhibition compiles arresting images from leading artists such as Chris Burden, Victor Burgin, Roe Ethridge, Victoria Fu, Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, and Kim Schoen.
A catalogue featuring texts by Rebecca Morse, Dhyandra Lawson, and Lisa Gabrielle Mark was been published on the occasion of this exhibition.
Learn more at LACMA.
October 17, 2021–February 13, 2022
The 1980s is considered by some to be the most important decade for the art of our age. For the first time, art was no longer determined by an all-dominant style, such as abstraction or Pop. The 1980s stand out for an unprecedented stylistic pluralism that resorted to the picture pool of past decades: it was the cradle of postmodernism. The exhibition The 80s. Art of the Eighties (2022) at ALBERTINA MODERN presented over one hundred and sixty works by artists who defined this decade and whose work continues to influence art in the twenty-first century.
Artists such as Troy Brauntuch, Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, and Robert Longo are among the first representatives of the so-called Pictures Generation. This loose grouping of artists goes back to the legendary Pictures exhibition curated by Douglas Crimp at Artists Space in New York in 1977. At the time it is no longer about depicting the perceived world; instead, they are making pictures of pictures: usually, new pictures are created with and after existing pictures by others. Sherrie Levine, who pursues this practice of appropriation with extreme resolution, cites Jorge Luis Borges and his short story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” (1939) in which the Argentine storyteller creates a fictitious writer. Borges’s story of the Knight of the Sad Countenance is identical to that of Miguel de Cervantes—word for word. Sherrie Levine’s pictures of pictures are, however, not exactly the same; her reproductions of great masters of modernism differ from the originals in size, materiality, and technique.
Learn more at the Albertina Modern.
May 19–December 31, 2021
The Bourse du Commerce Pinault Collection presents a selection of photographs from 1970 to 1990 by artists Michel Journiac, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, and Martha Wilson, who all radically broke from the notion of photography as a recorder of reality. For these artists, the photographic image was no longer just a form of evidence. Freed from its shackles, it could now be used to create forms of fiction, challenging notions of identity, and raising new questions about art, gender, and identity.
By claiming existing photographs, paintings, and sculptures as her own, Levine moved away from personal creation to question assumptions of uniqueness, authenticity, and originality—the basis for the monetization of a work of art, and factors influencing its market value. Turning to photography, she began producing a series entitled After followed by the name of the artist used, claiming the loan as a creative mode. The word “after” also reveals the anxiety of arriving too late, after discoveries and revolutions. A feminist, Levine only reproduces works by male artists in an effort to both denounce and thwart the male domination of art, founded on the idea of authority and genius. In 1980, she said: “I hope that in my photographs of photographs an uneasy peace will be made between my attraction to the ideals these pictures exemplify and my desire to have no ideals or fetters whatsoever.”
Learn more at the Pinault Collection.
October 19, 2020–May 9, 2021
On the occasion of the Museum’s 150th anniversary, Pictures, Revisited (2021) provocatively expands on The Met’s landmark 2009 exhibition The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984, which was the first major museum initiative to trace the art of appropriation through a complex network of practitioners, including Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, and Louise Lawler. These colleagues, collaborators, and sometimes classmates used appropriation to upend traditional notions of authorship and originality.
The current exhibition takes a deep dive into The Met’s rich collection of contemporary photography to explore photographic strategies of visual appropriation. The show’s twenty-nine works are comprised of images snipped from magazines, staged, or copied outright from other artworks. Drawing equally from pop culture and art history, the featured artists manipulate familiar photographs, ads, logos, and tropes, decontextualizing and reusing the imagery in their work. The works in Pictures, Revisited offer an antidote to the anxiety of influence—the fear that there is nothing new under the sun. In a world increasingly mediated by images, this exhibition suggests that there is no such thing as an original picture.
Learn more at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Featuring the word “ME.” on every day of the year, Sherrie Levine’s Diary 2019 is an artist’s book that connects to the long, complex history of journals within visual culture. The book is inspired by the famed opening entries of Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz’s Diary—“Monday: Me. Tuesday: Me. Wednesday: Me. Thursday: Me.”—an autobiographical work that covers more than a decade of the novelist’s life, from 1953 to 1969.
As featured in New York Magazine’s Art Book Shopping List and Town & Country's Best Daily Planners for 2019
February 14–May 13, 2018
It’s the 1980s as you’ve never seen them before: the iconic decade when artwork became a commodity and the artist, a brand. Razor-sharp, witty, satirical, and deeply subversive, this exhibition of nearly 150 works examined the origins and rise of a new generation of artists in New York who blurred the lines among art, entertainment, and commerce, a shift that continues to define contemporary art today.
This expansive exhibition presented a fresh and focused history of the decade, bringing together rarely displayed works from US and European collections for the first time since the 1980s. The artists included some of today’s most influential figures: Ashley Bickerton, Sarah Charlesworth, Jessica Diamond, Peter Halley, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, Joel Otterson, Richard Prince, Erika Rothenberg, Haim Steinbach, Meyer Vaisman, and Julia Wachtel, as well as artist collectives and projects such as ACT UP Gran Fury, The Offices, General Idea, Fashion Moda, and Guerrilla Girls.
Year by year, Brand New traced major artistic developments alongside the corresponding events that shaped the 1980s, such as the introduction of MTV, Reaganomics, financial crises, gentrification, and the height of the AIDS crisis. It also documented new collaborations taking place during this period, when artists came together to form their own complex commercial entities. These artist-run consultancies, aesthetic “service providers,” and pop-up storefronts redefined how art could be made and sold.
Brand New: Art and Commodity in the 1980s is accompanied by an exhibition catalogue. This groundbreaking book tells the story of the evolution of New York’s downtown art scene in the 1980s—from a DIY counterculture in the East Village to a legitimate gallery business in SoHo. Coinciding with the rise of modern branding and the onset of the information age, artists’ focus on commodities and consumerism began as satire but came to be much more complex: commodities and associated phenomena, such as advertising, now served as vessels for ideas, politics, and personal relationships in “brand-new” types of painting, sculpture, photography, installation, and performance.
Learn more at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.
October 28, 2017–February 12, 2018
With this largest-ever exhibition in the German-speaking world, containing over fifty works spanning thirty-five years, Neues Museum Nürnberg offers visitors an opportunity to experience and engage with the fascinating ideas and works of Sherrie Levine. Thirty-five years after her legendary first appearance on the vibrant New York art scene, Levine's works have maintained the power to surprise and polarize. The approach she radicalized then—and still pursues today—has (to varying degrees) always been practiced by artists: the appropriation, repetition, variation, and further development of iconic works from art history. Whereas in the Middle Ages, borrowing motifs was customary (in prints, for example), Levine's work appears today as a transgression and questioning of authorship.
Levine's oeuvre also takes the concept of the readymade a step further, using not everyday objects but artworks. In various media—photography, painting, sculpture—she addresses issues concerning the value and context of art, exploring the role of classical modernism in the attitudes of today. Visitors to the exhibition encounter works from art history that have achieved iconic status and that have been translated by Levine into other states. These include well-known works by Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Marcel Duchamp, Walker Evans, Vincent van Gogh, Yves Klein, Man Ray, and even Albrecht Dürer's world-famous hare. Especially when seen together like this, it becomes clear that the energy of the originals still resides in Levine's works but that these are also something decidedly new with an aura all of their own.
Learn more at Neues Museum Nürnberg.
(New York) David Zwirner is pleased to announce that Sherrie Levine has joined the New York gallery.
Sherrie Levine's work epitomizes many of the core tenets of postmodern art, incisively challenging notions of originality, authenticity, and identity. Since the late 1970s, she has created a singular and complex oeuvre using a variety of media, including photography, painting, and sculpture. Many of her works are explicitly appropriated from artworks within the modernist canon, while others are more general in their references, assimilating art historical interests and concerns rather than specific objects. Some of Levine's earliest work was included in Pictures, an important exhibition at Artists Space in New York in 1977 curated by Douglas Crimp that came to define The Pictures Generation—a group of artists examining the structures of signification underlying any image.
In 2011, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York presented MAYHEM, a major exhibition of Levine's work spanning three decades. The show included one of her most acclaimed series from 1981—a group of twenty-two photographs of reproductions of Walker Evans's photographs from his Farm Security Administration-commissioned project to document the rural South during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Referencing the loss of uniqueness as a result of mechanical (and digital) reproduction, and ironically using a medium generally held responsible for diminishing the value of the artist's hand, After Walker Evans: 1 – 22 emphasizes a description of the pictures in contextual, rather than formal terms.
Sherrie Levine: African Masks After Walker Evans, the artist's most recent series of photographs, is concurrently on view at Simon Lee Gallery in London (through July 25) and Jablonka Galerie in Cologne (through July 31).
Levine's work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions worldwide, most recently at the Portland Art Museum, Oregon (2013); Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld, Germany (2010); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2009 and 1991); and the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, New Mexico (2007). Other prominent venues which have held solo shows include Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen, Germany (1998); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Menil Collection, Houston (both 1995); Portikus, Frankfurt (1994); Philadelphia Museum of Art (1993); Kunsthalle Zürich (1991); High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (both 1988); and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut (1987).
Major group exhibitions include Prima Materia, Punta della Dogana, François Pinault Foundation, Venice (2013); The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2009); Whitney Biennial (2008, 1989, and 1985); SITE Santa Fe (2004); São Paulo Biennial (1998); Carnegie International (1988); Documenta 7 (1982); and Pictures, Artists Space, New York (1977).
Born in 1947 in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, Levine studied at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where she received her M.F.A. in 1973. The artist lives and works in New York and Santa Fe, New Mexico.
In addition to David Zwirner in New York, Sherrie Levine is represented by Jablonka Galerie in Cologne.
November 10, 2011 – January 29, 2012
Realized in collaboration with the artist, Mayhem surveyed 34 years of Levine’s work, from the late 1970s to 2011. The exhibition presented more than one hundred photographs, prints, paintings, and sculpture, including Levine's acclaimed series After Walker Evans: 1-22 (1981), in which the artist photographed reproductions of Evans's historic photographs documenting the Great Depression of the 1930s. Recent works cast in bronze, glass, and crystal were also included.
A fully illustrated monograph published by the Whitney Museum of American Art includes texts by the exhibition’s curators Johanna Burton and Elisabeth Sussman, writings by the artist, and essays by Thomas Crow, David Joselit, Maria H. Loh, Howard Singerman, and Carrie Springer. In their introduction to the publication, Burton and Sussman write, "As is the case with many artists of Levine’s generation who came of age in the late 1970s and early 1980s, her work is often discussed primarily in terms of . . . the questioning of traditional ideas of originality and authorship. Yet . . . this is only part of the story. Levine . . . has also succeeded in generating new meanings; indeed, her work functions to multiply images, objects, and things, but perhaps even more importantly, it sets them on new courses . . . Levine's work possesses a blend of criticality and generosity."
A four-star review of Mayhem in Time Out New York notes that "Thirty years on, Levine's art-historical critique still has bite … "
May 7, 2010–April 18, 2011
Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography (2011) presents a selection of outstanding photographs by women artists, charting the medium’s history from the dawn of the modern period to the present. Curated by Roxana Marcoci, Sarah Meister, and Eva Respini, the exhibition is comprised of over two hundred works, featuring celebrated masterworks by such figures as Diane Arbus, Berenice Abbott, Claude Cahun, Imogen Cunningham, Rineke Dijkstra, Florence Henri, Roni Horn, Nan Goldin, Sherrie Levine, Helen Levitt, Lisette Model, Lucia Moholy, Tina Modotti, Cindy Sherman, Kiki Smith, and Carrie Mae Weems, among many others. The exhibition also highlights works drawn from various curatorial departments, including Bottoms, a large-scale Fluxus wallpaper by Yoko Ono.
The exhibition’s accompanying publication, Modern Women: Women Artists At The Museum Of Modern Art, examines MoMA's collection by highlighting the work of modern and contemporary women artists whose diversity of practices and contributions to the avant-garde movements of the twentieth century have been enormous, if often underrecognized. Featuring fifty illustrated essays by many of the strongest voices in current research on art and gender, Modern Women presents a variety of generational and cultural perspectives and examines both canonical figures and lesser-known artists. Prefaced by three introductory essays, the book is organized chronologically into three sections, Early Modernism, Mid-Century, and Contemporary to emphasize new research on women artists within these historical time periods. Richly illustrated with works from the collection, Modern Women offers a lively discourse around gender and the production of meaning in art, one absolutely necessary for a more complex understanding of the art of our time.
Learn more at The Museum of Modern Art.
"The emotional resonance of The Pictures Generation has accrued over time, strengthened by its curious suitability to the present."—Gary Indiana, The New York Times T Magazine
In September 1977, Artists Space in New York opened a now-historic group exhibition titled Pictures. Curated by the critic Douglas Crimp, the exhibition featured work by Troy Brauntuch, Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo, and Philip Smith. The exhibition has come to define The Pictures Generation—an influential group of artists whose work examines the ways in which images convey meaning.
"To an ever greater extent", Crimp wrote in the catalogue essay, "our experience is governed by pictures, pictures in newspapers and magazines, on television and in the cinema. Next to these pictures firsthand experience begins to retreat, to become more and more trivial. While it once seemed that pictures had the function of interpreting reality, it now seems that they have usurped it. It therefore becomes imperative to understand the picture itself . . . to determine how a picture becomes a signifying structure of its own accord."
Levine's work in the exhibition was the early series Sons and Lovers (1976–77), in which five silhouettes—including the profiles of former US presidents Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, and John F. Kennedy—are rendered on graph paper in fluorescent color and arranged in 35 different configurations. "There are, in all," Crimp writes, "five different 'characters': Washington, Lincoln, and John Kennedy, an unknown woman, and a couple. The president's silhouettes are familiar emblems from the faces of coins, while the bland couple and the 'other woman' are taken from wig advertisements. Each drawing pairs two of these silhouettes facing each other . . . The act of confrontation that is the only psychological relationship fully stated by the images is all that is required to establish a narrative."
Levine again used presidential profiles in the series Presidential Collages (1979). In her acclaimed series After Walker Evans: 1–22 (1981), the artist explicitly challenged notions of originality, authenticity, and identity by taking photographs of reproductions of Evans's photographs documenting the Great Depression of the 1930s.