Sturtevant has been repeating the works of her contemporaries since 1964, using some of the most iconic artworks of her generation as a source and catalyst to explore originality and authorship. Beginning with her versions of works by Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol, Sturtevant initially turned the visual logic of Pop art back on itself, probing uncomfortably at the workings of art history in real time. Yet her chameleonlike embrace of other artists' work is also what has allowed her to be largely overlooked in the history of postwar American art. As a woman making versions of the work of better-known male artists, she has passed almost unnoticed through the hierarchies of mid-century modernism and postmodernism, at once absent from these histories while nevertheless articulating their structures. Published to accompany the first retrospective of her work organized by a US museum, this publication presents Sturtevant as an artist who adopts style as her medium to expose aspects of art making, circulation and canonization. Featuring works drawn from all periods of her career and previously unpublished sketches from her archive, it links Sturtevant's earliest repetitions to the video works she has produced since 1998, providing a comprehensive overview of her practice while situating it firmly within postwar American culture.
Sturtevant was born in Lakewood, Ohio, in 1924. She had her first solo show in 1965 at the Bianchini Gallery in New York. Solo exhibitions of her work have since been held at Deichtorhallen, Hamburg (1992), Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2004), Musée d'Art Moderne, Paris (2010) and Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2012). In 2011, Sturtevant received the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the 54th Venice Biennale.
