Perry Rubenstein's 24th Street gallery will present a single monumental work by
Elaine Sturtevant, marking her first solo exhibition in more than one decade. Working
alongside her contemporaries beginning in the mid-1960s, Sturtevant is best known
for her repetition of works by Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, Claus Oldenburg, Jasper
Johns and Joseph Beuys, among others. Exploring originality, copy, fake, replica and
simulacra, her work has been a meditation as much as a provocation on such
concepts, continuing to garner attention in her forty years of practice from both the
fields of art history and philosophy. Sturtevant's work cuts deep and deliberately
across the primacy of visual illusion, questioning the limitations of our immediate
identification with a recognizable work of art. This ongoing practice has
demonstrated that through repetition the history of aesthetics has been structured
and determined by whatever is understood to be the non-visual, the unseen and
thought. Sturtevant's goal, as she puts it, is "to engender polemics," to "narrow the
gap between the visible and articulate." In works such as Warhol Flowers (made at
different times between 1964 to 1991), Johns Flag (1965), and Lichtenstein
Happy Tears (1966–67), made predominantly from memory, Sturtevant uses
identical techniques in terms of color and material.
Sturtevant's first major museum survey, Sturtevant-The Brutal Truth, will be on view
September 25, 2004 – January 30, 2005 at the Museum für Moderne Kunst,
Frankfurt am Main. The catalogue raisonné of Sturtevant's body of work will be
available in September.
Born in 1930 in Lakewood, Ohio, Sturtevant currently lives and works in Paris, and
has participated in international solo and group exhibitions at: Musée d'art moderne
et contemporain, Geneva; List Visual Art, Cambridge; Casino Luxembourg, Forum
d'Art Contemporain, Luxembourg; Villa Arson, Musée d'Art Contemporain, Nice;
Foundation Beyeler, Basel; Neues Museum, Bremen; Wiener Secession, Vienna;
Museum der Kultur der Welt, Berlin; Serpentine Gallery, London; and, Abbaye Saint
André, Meymac.