Sherrie Levine

David Zwirner is pleased to announce an exhibition of new and recent work by American artist Sherrie Levine at the gallery’s Paris location. Featuring major new suites of paintings and photographs, as well as a selection of sculptures, this exhibition showcases several bodies of work that are central to Levine’s practice, and that distinctly engage her ongoing inquiry into notions of authorship, originality, and authenticity. This is the artist’s fifth solo presentation with David Zwirner since joining the gallery in 2015 and her first in Paris in more than thirty years. A concurrent exhibition of Levine’s work is on view at the gallery’s East 69th Street location in New York.

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.

Image: Sherrie Levine, Rectangle Paintings: 1-12, 2023 (detail)

Location

108, rue Vieille du Temple Paris France, 75003

Dates

April 20—June 3, 2023

Artist

Sherrie Levine

Press Release

Sherrie Levine

Installation view, Sherrie Levine, David Zwirner, Paris, 2023

“I don’t think it’s useful to see culture as rigid and unchanging. I’d rather see it as having many voices, some conscious and some unconscious, which may be at odds with one another. If we are attentive to these voices, we can collaborate with them to create something almost new.”

—Sherrie Levine

Sherrie Levine

Repetition and Difference, 2002

Black glass and polished bronze

Bronze: 6 3/8 x 3 1/4 x 2 1/2 inches (16.2 x 8.3 x 6.3 cm)
Glass: 6 7/8 x 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 inches (17.5 x 8.9 x 6.3 cm)

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The exhibition in Paris—the artist’s first in the city in over thirty years—is bookended by two early sculptural works by Levine, created in 2002. Each is comprised of a pair of small-scale gnome figures—a replica of one of the dwarfs from Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs—rendered in black or white glass and positioned alongside a more traditional-looking polished bronze figure. The notion of the pair is fundamental to Levine's practice and concerns the relationship of one thing, or artwork, to another, while also raising the broader question of whether a pair is a repetition.

Installation view, Sherrie Levine: Pairs and Posses, Haus Lange, Kunstmuseen Krefeld, 2010–2011. Photo by Volker Döhne

Installation view of Sherrie Levine’s Crystal Skull (2010), on view in Prima Materia, Punta della Dogana, Venice, 2013–2014. Photo by ORCH orsenigo_chemollo

“The gnomes do not correspond one-to-one to their titles, nor to one another.… The repetition and displacement in Levine’s pairings suggest a sort of serial monogamy, a stuttering substitution of stand-ins for a lost original.”

—Howard Singerman, art historian

Sherrie Levine

Ivory Dominoes: 1-12, 2022

Twelve (12) tempera on mahogany panels

Overall dimensions variable
Each: 20 x 16 inches (50.8 x 40.6 cm)

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Also on view is Ivory Dominoes, a suite of 12 paintings on mahogany that replicate the surface of a group of dominoes. The work is an example of Levine’s earlier “generic abstractions,” which evoked minimalist painting and sculpture from the 1960s and 1970s, as well as the surfaces of game boards such as chess or backgammon.

Sherrie Levine, Untitled (Lead Checks/ Lead Chevron: 8), 1988. Collection of Musée d'art moderne et contemporain, Geneva

El Lissitzky, Part of the Show Machinery, 1923 (detail). Collection of the Tate Museum, London

Here, ivory paint is lightly washed over the surface of the wood, leaving the grain visible and emphasizing the painting's support, and black and red dots are arrayed across the surface in a seemingly random pattern. While the colors of the paintings are true to the dominoes, they also recall colors commonly used in constructivist paintings, a frequent point of reference for the artist, such as those by El Lissitzky.

Sherrie Levine, Ivory Dominoes: 1-12, 2022 (detail)

“In Levine’s case, her treatment of an array of game board motifs is one of the only areas of her work predicated upon the appropriation of an entire collective genre of patterns or design, not just one individual artist’s work at a time.”

—Larry List, writer and curator, in Sherrie Levine: Hong Kong Dominoes, David Zwirner Books, 2021

Sherrie Levine

Rectangle Paintings: 1-12, 2023

Twelve (12) oil on mahogany panels

Overall dimensions variable
Each: 26 1/2 x 18 3/4 inches (67.3 x 47.6 cm)

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Further expanding on the “generic abstractions,” Rectangle Paintings: 1-12 takes its motif from traditional Native American blankets, specifically those created by the Navajo people. By appropriating an art form from outside the Western art-historical canon, Levine points to one of the primary influences of modernist artists in the early twentieth century, who were drawn to so-called exotic art for its formal and aesthetic qualities.

Navajo Wearing Blanket, 1865–75 (detail). Collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Gift of Mrs. Russell Sage, 1910

Installation view of Sherrie Levine’s Large Check: 3, Large Check: 5-10, and Large Check: 12, 1987, on view in Collection 1970s—Present, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Ongoing. Photo by Denis Doorly

“Levine acknowledges in her work both the ambiguity of anyone’s claim to ‘own’ images and, moreover, the deep desire people have to do so nevertheless—generating a tension that problematizes the issue of access and, indeed, of readability, thereby underlining how art is clearly as hierarchical on the receiving end as on the creating one.”

—Johanna Burton, director, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

Installation view, Sherrie Levine, David Zwirner, Paris, 2023

A focus of the Paris exhibition are a number of recent After Stieglitz sets, each of which is comprised of six archival giclée prints. The series relates to Levine's ongoing practice of photographing reproductions of artworks, which she began in the early 1980s, this time revisiting Alfred Stieglitz’s important Equivalents series (1925–1934).

Sherrie Levine

After Stieglitz: Set A: 1-6, 2023

Six (6) archival giclée prints

Overall dimensions variable
Each: 21 7/8 x 17 inches (55.7 x 43.2 cm)

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“Stieglitz’s Equivalents series is … identified as one of the earliest instances of abstract photography. Sherrie Levine, for her part, confesses that she likes to take on works that act precisely as turning points in art history, in order to cast doubt on the modernist myth of a history in constant progression.”

—Nicolas-Xavier Ferrand, researcher and curator, Bourse de Commerce, Pinault Collection

Sherrie Levine, After Stieglitz: Set A: 1-6, 2023 (detail)

In appropriating Stieglitz's motif in this and other works, including Equivalents (After Stieglitz) 1-18 (2006) and Gray and Blue Monochromes after Stieglitz: 1-36 (2010), Levine questions the referential quality of abstraction by layering these points of reference.

Installation view, Sherrie Levine’s Gray and Blue Monochromes after Stieglitz: 1-36 (2010), on view in Une seconde d'éternité, Bourse de Commerce - Pinault Collection, Paris, 2022. Photo by Aurélien Mole

Installation view, Sherrie Levine’s Equivalents (After Stieglitz): 1-18 (2006), on view in Sherrie Levine: MAYHEM, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2012. Photo by Sheldan C. Collins

Sherrie Levine

Avant Garde and Kitsch, 2002

Crystal glass and polished bronze

Bronze: 7 3/8 x 3 1/4 x 2 1/2 inches (18.7 x 8.3 x 6.3 cm)
Glass: 6 7/8 x 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 inches (17.5 x 8.9 x 6.3 cm)

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“When I started doing this work, I wanted to make a picture that contradicted itself. I wanted to put a picture on top of a picture so that there are times when both pictures disappear and other times when they’re both manifest; that vibration is basically what the work is about for me—that space in the middle where there’s no picture.”

—Sherrie Levine

Installation view, Sherrie Levine, David Zwirner, Paris, 2023

On view in New York

Sherrie Levine: Wood

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