Elaine Sturtevant - Work

Work

Sturtevant was born in Lakewood, Ohio (USA) and made the first years of her artists life working in New York where she began in 1965 to manually reproduce paintings and objects created by her contemporaries with results that can immediately be identified with an original. Sturtevant thus turns the concept of originality on its head. All of her works are copies of the works of other artists; none is an original. She initially focused on works by such American artists as Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Jasper Johns, and Andy Warhol. In the late 1960s, she concentrated on replicating works by Joseph Beuys and Duchamp. Since the early 1980s, she has focused on the next generation of artists, including Robert Gober, Anselm Kiefer, Paul McCarthy, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres. She masters painting, sculpture, photography and film in order to produce a full range of copies of the works of her chosen artists. In most cases, her decision to start copying an artist happened before those artists achieved broader recognition. Nearly all of the artists she chose to copy are today considered iconic for their time or style. This has given rise to discussions amongst art critics on how it has been possible for Sturtevant to identify these now famous artists at such an early stage.

In 1991, Sturtevant presented an entire show consisting of her repetition of Warhol’s ‘Flowers’ series. In 1965 a Jasper Johns flag painting that formed part of Robert Rauschenberg's “Short Circuit” was stolen, so Rauschenberg got Sturtevant to paint a reproduction of Johns’s flag.