Appropriation artist Sherrie Levine, a founding member of The Pictures Generation, is well known for her collections of photographs lifted directly from the work of mostly male modern masters, such as After Walker Evans (1981), After Stieglitz, After Cézanne (2007) and After August Sander (2012). Raising questions about originality and authenticity, Levine re-photographs, abstracts or digitizes these images, making them “ghosts” of the original images. “I want to put a picture on top of a picture,” Levine says. “This makes for times when both disappear and other times when they’re both visible.” Her sculptures and paintings examine similar concerns, as in polished bronze replicas of Marcel Duchamp's urinal or watercolors of famous paintings copied precisely from books, preserving distorted colors or reproductions in black and white.
Appropriation artist Sherrie Levine, a founding member of The Pictures Generation, is well known for her collections of photographs lifted directly from the work of mostly male modern masters, such as After Walker Evans (1981), After Stieglitz, After Cézanne (2007) and After August Sander (2012). Raising questions about originality and authenticity, Levine re-photographs, abstracts or digitizes these images, making them “ghosts” of the original images. “I want to put a picture on top of a picture,” Levine says. “This makes for times when both disappear and other times when they’re both visible.” Her sculptures and paintings examine similar concerns, as in polished bronze replicas of Marcel Duchamp's urinal or watercolors of famous paintings copied precisely from books, preserving distorted colors or reproductions in black and white.
