Sherrie Levine: Wood

Name: Press Release
Start: 2023-04-27
End: 2023-07-21
Location: David Zwirner

David Zwirner is pleased to announce an exhibition of work by American artist Sherrie Levine at the gallery’s 69th Street location. For this exhibition, the artist presents a never-before-seen suite of wood-panel paintings as well as a new installation of found-object sculptures. Together, the works in this presentation demonstrate Levine’s ongoing inquiry into the concepts surrounding ownership, authorship, originality, and authenticity, as well as her enduring interest in materiality. A concurrent exhibition of Levine’s work is on view at the gallery’s Paris location.

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, Fitz 1, 1994 (detail)

Location

34 East 69th Street New York New York, 10021

Dates

April 27—July 21, 2023

Gallery Hours

Mon—Fri 10am–6pm

Artist

Sherrie Levine

Press Release

Sherrie Levine: Wood

Installation view, Sherrie Levine: Wood, David Zwirner, New York, 2023

The focus of the exhibition is a suite of twelve paintings featuring the exuberant face of a cartoon dog from a popular animated series. The work relates to Levine's appropriative practice of the 1980s, including her celebrated series of paintings of characters from the Krazy Kat cartoon strips.

Sherrie Levine

Fitz: 1-12, 1994

Twelve (12) casein on cherry wood panels

Overall dimensions variable
Each: 10 x 10 inches (25.4 x 25.4 cm)

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“All of Levine’s work, from [the photographs] to her Krazy Kat paintings … forces us to acknowledge that, to some degree, all art is based on other art.… Indeed, any so-called original always derives from sources, precedents, influences, inspirations, and copies.”

—Adam D. Weinberg, director, Whitney Museum of American Art

Sherrie Levine, Krazy Kat: 1, 1988. Collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Promised gift of Emily Fisher Landau

Sherrie Levine, Koko, 1991. Collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Sherrie Levine, Ignatz: 6, 1988, Collection of The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. T. B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 1992

Sherrie Levine

Fox, 2023

Burl wood

23 1/2 x 15 x 6 inches (58.4 x 38.1 x 15.2 cm)

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The exhibition also features a new installation of found object sculptures, including a Japanese burlwood kitsune fox figurine, a New Guinea ceremonial stone mortar head, and a wooden scholar figure.

The works expand upon Levine’s previous sculptural appropriations in which she cast quotidian items, animal skulls, or ritual objects in bronze or glass, such as Body Mask (2007)—now on view in Reaching for the Stars: Works from the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Collection at the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi—a bronze cast of a ritualistic mask belonging to the Makonde from southeastern Tanzania.

Installation view, Sherrie Levine’s Body Mask (2007), on view in Reaching for the Stars: Works from the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Collection, Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Florence. Photo by Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio

Sherrie Levine, Fox, 2023 (detail)

With the new installation, instead of presenting her own polished renditions of found objects, Levine represents craft objects that she sourced from an online auction in a traditional gallery setting. In a new essay written on the occasion of the exhibition, art historian Howard Singerman notes that the works “test another formula for the readymade—Robert Rauschenberg’s famous telegram ‘This is a portrait of Iris Clert, if I say so’—as directly as [Levine’s] early rephotographs did.”

Sherrie Levine

Head, 2023

Stone

7 x 7 x 7 inches (17.8 x 17.8 x 17.8 cm)

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Sherrie Levine, Fitz: 1, 1994

Sherrie Levine, Fitz: 6, 1994

Sherrie Levine, Fitz: 12, 1994

“Even when Ms. Levine copies images of Krazy Kat and Ignatz on small wood panels, she makes sparks. Whether or not she believes in the artist’s touch, she has a distinctive one.”

—Roberta Smith, chief critic, The New York Times

Sherrie Levine, Fitz: 9, 1994 (detail)

To create the Fitz paintings, the artist worked from an illustration found in an animator’s guide, eschewing the typical model of viewing and copying directly from original artworks at museums in favor of the replicated image.

Seen together, the works on view question the notions of originality, authenticity, and the commodification of art, as well as the differentiation between high and low.

Sherrie Levine

Scholar Figure, 2023

Burl wood

58 x 16 x 10 inches (147.3 x 40.6 x 25.4 cm)

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“They are, as Duchamp would have it, unassisted readymades, made art, or art objects within this art world, by the act of selection and display, by title, signature, and the proper name.… Objects of projection and desire, their relation to Levine’s catalogue of similar objects is clear, but their relation to their past lives is infrathin, always there—particularly in their woodenness, in their grain.”

—Howard Singerman, art historian

Installation view, Sherrie Levine: Wood, David Zwirner, New York, 2023

On view in Paris

Sherrie Levine

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