Sherrie Levine: After Reinhardt

Auto-interview by Ad Reinhardt

New work by American artist Sherrie Levine engages her ongoing practice of appropriating artworks from the Western art historical canon—this time by taking Ad Reinhardt’s Blue Paintings as a point of departure.

Monochromes After Reinhardt: 1–28 (2018) continues the artist’s ongoing investigation of color separated from its representational function. Inspired by the exhibition Ad Reinhardt: Blue Paintings held at David Zwirner, New York in 2017, Levine has created abstract restatements of the 28 works that were on view, making use of pixilation to consolidate the range of blue tones in each painting into a single, truly monochromatic value. This work revisits a technique first employed by Levine in her 1989 group of woodcut prints Meltdown, where an averaging algorithm was used to create a checkerboard composition based on modernist artists’ iconic paintings.

Sherrie Levine: After Reinhardt is published on the occasion of Levine’s eponymous solo exhibition at David Zwirner’s Upper East Side location in New York in 2019. The publication features full color reproductions of Monochromes After Reinhardt: 1–28 and includes the 1965 text “Reinhardt Paints a Picture,” in which Reinhardt famously interviewed himself.