Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection, Paris
May 2021
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.