ART CITIES: N.York-Sherrie Levine
Sherrie Levine rose to prominence as a member of the Pictures Generation, a group of artists based in New York in the late 1970s and 1980s whose work examined the structures of signification underlying mass-circulated images, and, in many cases, directly appropriated these images in order to imbue them with new, critically inflected meaning. Since then, Levine has created a singular and complex body of work in a variety of media that often explicitly reproduces artworks and motifs from the Western art-historical canon as well as non-Western cultures.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: David Zwirner Gallery Archive
For her exhibition, Sherrie Levine presents a never-before-seen suite of wood-panel paintings as well as a new installation of found-object sculptures, including a Japanese burlwood kitsune fox figurine, a New Guinea ceremonial stone mortar head, and a wooden scholar figure. Together, the works in this presentation demonstrate Levine’s ongoing inquiry into concepts surrounding ownership, authorship, originality, and authenticity, as well as her enduring interest in materiality. A concurrent exhibition of Levine’s work will be on view at the gallery’s Paris location. The most recent work in this exhibition, “Scholar Figure”, “Head”, and “Fox”, test another formula for the readymade—Robert Rauschenberg’s famous telegram “This is a portrait of Iris Clert, if I say so”—as directly as her early rephotographs did. They are, as Duchamp would have it, unassisted readymades, made art, or art objects within this art world, by the act of selection and display, by title, signature, and the proper name. But they test even more insistently than the industrial objects Duchamp chose whether the shift in context can hold, whether these works, at once made and unfinished—unfrozen—could conceivably revert to different kinds of works by other kinds of artists, or at least to the odd and searchable spaces of 1stdibs, and onto other shelves in a different kind of collection. Objects of projection and desire, their relation to Levine’s catalogue of similar objects is clear, but their relation to their past lives is infrathin, always there—particularly in their woodenness, in their grain. Levine has always had a taste for wood; it has served as a ground for her work since her 1984 casein-on-mahogany paintings after Kasimir Malevich and Ilya Chasnick; she unveiled it as her subject in the Knot Paintings of the later 1980s. In those works on blank plywood grounds, Levine’s intervention was to paint the regularized but seemingly random eye-shaped plugs lumber companies use to repair knots and irregularities in the grain, an image at once based on chance aberrations and interruptions, and absolutely machine-made—at once intentional and, like the wooden objects here, found. The oldest work in the exhibition is a series of small paintings on cherry panels from the mid-1990s. Each panel holds the same image, one after another, of a disgruntled cartoon animal. Levine’s subject here is “Fitz the Dog”, created by the cartoonist Dick Huemer for Max Fleischer Studios in the 1920s. Levine cropped Fitz’s portrait from an animator’s guide showing the decidedly human dog from the front, side, and rear, and running through a set of cartoon emotions. Blown up and fitted to the cherry panels, the animator’s fluid ink lines become craggy, roughhewn, and abstract; they barely hold together as a face. And here they come around to “Head” and “Scholar Figure”, nearly overwhelmed by their materiality and again their woodenness.
Photo: Sherrie Levine, Fitz: 1, 1994, Twelve (12) casein on cherry wood panels, Overall dimensions variable, Each: 10 x 10 inches (25.4 x 25.4 cm), Each signed, titled, dated, and numbered verso, © Sherrie Levine, Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner Gallery
Info: David Zwirner Gallery, 34 East 69th Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 27/4-21/7/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://www.davidzwirner.com/
