STURTEVANT

Matthew Marks is pleased to announce Sturtevant, the next exhibition in his galleries at 1062 North Orange Grove and 7818 Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles. Spanning the majority of Sturtevant’s career, the exhibition features painting, sculpture, drawing, and video work made between 1965 and 2004. This is the first exhibition of Sturtevant’s work in Los Angeles since 2015, when the retrospective “Sturtevant: Double Trouble” appeared at MOCA.

Sturtevant (1924–2014) first exhibited in New York in the 1960s and quickly became known for her repetitions of recognizable artworks made by other contemporary artists. Her works were initially misinterpreted as “copies,” despite the fact that Sturtevant found little interest in exact replicas. Instead, she insisted on the disruption of meaning through her repetitions. As one writer observed: “As a replicator, Ms. Sturtevant was an original.”

Curator Peter Eleey describes Sturtevant’s work: “By faking faking, Sturtevant showed that she was not a copyist, plagiarist, parodist, forger, or imitator, but was rather a kind of actionist, who adopted style as her medium in order to investigate aspects of art’s making, circulation, consumption, and canonization.”

The recognizability of Sturtevant’s subjects was critical to this investigation. Nine Warhol Flowers (1965/69), Warhol Gold Triptych Marilyn (2004), and Johns Target with Four Faces (1986) are Sturtevant’s versions of some these artists’ best-known images. Her Gonzalez-Torres Untitled (America) (2004) features twelve strands of his iconic lightbulbs strung from the ceiling.

Another work on view, Haring Subway Drawing (1986), was created contemporaneously to Haring’s own drawings made on New York City subway platforms in the 1980s. Haring’s pervasiveness at the time was essential for Sturtevant, as she once remarked, “Every kid with a lollypop knows Haring.”

Also on view is Sturtevant’s landmark video work, The Dark Threat of Absence (2002), which features Sturtevant reperforming Paul McCarthy’s performance as Willem de Kooning in Painter (1995), juxtaposed with appropriated commercial advertising. The artist’s writing on this work could be applied to her entire pioneering vision, as she often proclaimed: “It is about the power of thought.”

Sturtevant was awarded the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011. Her work has been featured in numerous one-person museum exhibitions, including at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris; Kunsthalle, Zürich; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Serpentine Galleries, London; and MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt.