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Lot Essay
Sherrie Levine is known for her series of works that reproduce canonized pieces from great masters such as Vincent van Gogh into prints or photographs. Her continued interest in appropriation developed into a series of bronze casts as in her seminal piece Fountain (Madonna) after Marcel Duchamp (1991). Levine's reproductions of Brancusi's heads in glass or bronze, continued to reference the artistic canon. Simultaneously to this approach, her cast pairings of objects such as garden gnomes in Avant-Garde and Kitsch (2002) level disparities in taste between high art, popular culture and curios.
Works in Levine's skull series oscillate somewhere between the ready-made and the still life. They evolve out of an interest in the material culture of our time and the representation of nature into bookplates or curiosities. Javelina (2010) is the skull of an animal found in the Southwest of the United States, resembling a wild boar transformed into a highly polished bronze cast. It is part of a series that emerges both from Skull (2001) and Levine's interest in the representation of nature as in the photographic series After Karl Blossfeldt: 1-20 (1990).
With Javelina, Levine references the two-dimensional vanitas present within great Renaissance works that accompany the portraits of remarkable patrons. Levine's transposition of a painterly subject into a three-dimensional object is most specifically recognizable in La Fortune (After Man Ray: 4) of 1990, rendering the billiard table into a sculpture of felt and mahogany. The vanitas functions as a metaphor for transience: within the hands of Levine it becomes a three-dimensional replica of an artifact and a curiosity, something that can be placed within the vast reservoir of accumulated knowledge, subject to scrutiny yet remaining more of a sign than a specimen.
Levine's works such as False God (2008), a cast of double-headed skeleton of a calf, and Javelina, are placed somewhere between a chimera and the object of desire, highlighting the sensuousness of the reproduction that can transform reality into something more extraordinary than fiction. Her skull pieces have the potential to reframe the space where they are shown into a still life composition, or the chamber of a naturalist. They project a certain aesthetic lineage: the vernacular South West, the legacy of artist Georgia O'Keeffe, and the early aesthetics of specimen collection that lead to the Enlightenment.
Placing emphasis on context, central to positions on art since Duchamp, Levine's remarks on painting can be generalized to the work of art, where meaning "lies not in its origin, but in its destination." (As cited in, Mayhem, Whitney Museum of American Art).
Peccaries, a mammal native to warmer regions of North America, of which javelinas are a species, usually exist in herds or in pairs. Contextualizing the isolated skull as art is part of the multiple processes of artistic transformation that Levine operates. Its formal and aesthetic qualities raise it to the level of the exquisite object.
Sherrie Levine rematerializes transient forms in nature, engaging with the ambiguous ideas of source and context while revealing the extraordinary singularity of the object and its transformation.
Works in Levine's skull series oscillate somewhere between the ready-made and the still life. They evolve out of an interest in the material culture of our time and the representation of nature into bookplates or curiosities. Javelina (2010) is the skull of an animal found in the Southwest of the United States, resembling a wild boar transformed into a highly polished bronze cast. It is part of a series that emerges both from Skull (2001) and Levine's interest in the representation of nature as in the photographic series After Karl Blossfeldt: 1-20 (1990).
With Javelina, Levine references the two-dimensional vanitas present within great Renaissance works that accompany the portraits of remarkable patrons. Levine's transposition of a painterly subject into a three-dimensional object is most specifically recognizable in La Fortune (After Man Ray: 4) of 1990, rendering the billiard table into a sculpture of felt and mahogany. The vanitas functions as a metaphor for transience: within the hands of Levine it becomes a three-dimensional replica of an artifact and a curiosity, something that can be placed within the vast reservoir of accumulated knowledge, subject to scrutiny yet remaining more of a sign than a specimen.
Levine's works such as False God (2008), a cast of double-headed skeleton of a calf, and Javelina, are placed somewhere between a chimera and the object of desire, highlighting the sensuousness of the reproduction that can transform reality into something more extraordinary than fiction. Her skull pieces have the potential to reframe the space where they are shown into a still life composition, or the chamber of a naturalist. They project a certain aesthetic lineage: the vernacular South West, the legacy of artist Georgia O'Keeffe, and the early aesthetics of specimen collection that lead to the Enlightenment.
Placing emphasis on context, central to positions on art since Duchamp, Levine's remarks on painting can be generalized to the work of art, where meaning "lies not in its origin, but in its destination." (As cited in, Mayhem, Whitney Museum of American Art).
Peccaries, a mammal native to warmer regions of North America, of which javelinas are a species, usually exist in herds or in pairs. Contextualizing the isolated skull as art is part of the multiple processes of artistic transformation that Levine operates. Its formal and aesthetic qualities raise it to the level of the exquisite object.
Sherrie Levine rematerializes transient forms in nature, engaging with the ambiguous ideas of source and context while revealing the extraordinary singularity of the object and its transformation.