Press release
June 2015
(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.