Sturtevant
@ The Art Institute of Chicago
111 S Michigan Ave, Chicago, IL 60603
Opening Wednesday, September 23rd, at 6PM
Since in the mid-1960s Sturtevant has meticulously re-created works by other artists—including Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, Roy Lichtenstein, George Segal, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Gober, Anselm Kiefer, Paul McCarthy, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Joseph Beuys—often making her pieces around the same time as the originals. For example, in 1964, the same year that Andy Warhol began his flower paintings, Sturtevant used the original silk screen, which Warhol gave her, to create her own. When Warhol was asked about his process for these paintings, it is said that he replied, “I don’t know. Ask Elaine Sturtevant.” For Sturtevant her work is not about copying or appropriation because she utilizes the same materials and the same process as the artist did in the original. She explains, “My work has nothing to do with ‘appropriation,’ the refocusing of history, or the death of art, or the negative questioning of originality. Rather just the opposite. It involves the power and autonomy of originality and the focus and pervasiveness of art.”
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