Elaine Sturtevant

Place: Lakewood

Born: 1930

Death: 2014

Biography:

Elaine Frances Sturtevant just a few blocs away from where the original exhibition actually happened, in 1961.
From the early 1980s she focused on the next generation of artists, including Robert Gober, Anselm Kiefer, Paul McCarthy, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres. She mastered 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 among art critics on how it had been possible for Sturtevant to identify those artists at such an early stage.
In 1991, Sturtevant presented an entire show consisting of her repetition of Warhol’s Flowers series.
Her later works mainly focus on reproductions in the digital age. Sturtevant commented on her work at her 2012 retrospective Sturtevant: Image over Image at the Moderna Museet: "What is currently compelling is our pervasive cybernetic mode, which plunks copyright into mythology, makes origins a romantic notion, and pushes creativity outside the self. Remake, reuse, reassemble, recombine—that's the way to go."
After feeling misunderstood by critics and artists, Sturtevant stopped making art for a decade. Her 2014 exhibition at MoMA was the first significant exhibition in the US in decades. Her last large-scale installation, The House of Horrors, has been on temporary display at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris since June 2015.
"In some ways, style is her medium. She was the first postmodern artist—before the fact—and also the last", according to Peter Eleey, curator of her 2014 Moma exhibition.
Sturtevant died on May 7, 2014, in Paris, where she had been living and working since the early 1990s. She was 89.
Sturtevant had her first her solo exhibition in 1965 at the Bianchini Gallery, in New York. In 1975, a show was dedicated to her by the German art dealer Reinhard Onnasch in his New York gallery.
Solo exhibitions of her work have since been mounted at:
In 2008, Sturtevant received the Francis J. Greenburger Award.
On June 4, 2011, Sturtevant received the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the 54th Venice Biennale.
In September 2013, she was awarded the Kurt Schwitters Prize for Lifetime Achievement by the Sprengel Museum.

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