Sherrie Levine: 1977-1988

Aspen Art Museum presents Sherrie Levine: 1977-1988, an exhibition devoted to the first eleven years of Sherrie Levine's practice. This marks the American artist's first significant museum exhibition since Mayhem, her 2011 retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

Levine’s work analyzes the ways in which identity is generated through our relationship to inherited images and forms. Emerging alongside a group of like-minded artists and writers in the 1970s and 1980s, Levine utilized diverse media including photography, painting, collage and sculpture to challenge conventional assumptions around autonomy, originality and agency.

The earliest work in the exhibition, Shoe Sale (1977), establishes Levine’s enduring relationship to the readymade, an artistic development conceived by Marcel Duchamp in which prefabricated items were redefined as artworks through a contextual shift. This interest in framing connects to some of Levine’s most celebrated works, from her President Collages (1979) to her many projects replicating canonical artworks from Vincent Van Gogh to Walker Evans.

Paintings by Levine fill the museum’s ground floor. Using checks, stripes and chevrons in an array of colors, Levine continues to reference the (male) painters she previously appropriated, further emptying their forms of any universal or transcendent ambitions. The gallery also includes five of Levine’s Knot Paintings (1985-1987). On untreated expanses of plywood, Levine paints only the randomly distributed knot patches, allowing them to dictate the final form of the artwork. These works demonstrate an interest in chance that is present in the game board motif and are also a pun on “not painting”.

Levine enacts an ultra-thin mediation in her work, through which distinguishing factors between her art and the original source material often sit beyond comprehension, disrupting established notions of both artist and artwork. This interstitial space is both restorative and melancholic in Levine’s clear-eyed and delicate interventions. As she wrote in 1982, “I like to think of my paintings as membranes permeable from both sides so there is an easy flow between the past and future, between my history and yours.”

Sherrie Levine: 1977-1988 is curated by Scott Portnoy, Curator at Large, Aspen Art Museum.

Learn more at Aspen Art Museum.