About the artist
The American artist Sturtevant is best known for her repetitions of works by other artists, which she recreated from memory after having seen an artwork that would become iconic. These can immediately be identified with the original, but they are not copies. Her first exhibition, held in 1965 at the Bianchini Gallery, New York, featured Sturtevant’s Andy Warhol silkscreened flowers, Jasper Johns flag, Frank Stella concentric square, Claes Oldenburg garment and other paintings suspended on a clothes rack. When Warhol was asked how he made his work he famously replied: ‘I don’t know. Ask Elaine [Sturtevant]’. Other artists whose work she replicated include her contemporaries in American Pop – Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist and Tom Wesselmann – as well as Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Beuys, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Keith Haring and Anselm Kiefer.

Sturtevant worked across media, ranging from painting and sculpture to photography and, from 2000 onwards, video works that combined advertising and internet images with her own film material. Her videos engage with today’s image-saturated media culture through a repetition of a different kind based on a continuous loop. As the artist stated in 2012, ‘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.’

Born in Lakewood, Ohio in 1924, Elaine Sturtevant received her BA from the University of Iowa and studied philosophy at the University of Zurich. She then obtained an MA in psychology from Columbia University. In 1990, she relocated from the US to Paris, where she lived and worked until her death in 2014. She was awarded the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011, and her pioneering work has been featured in numerous solo exhibitions, including at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2015); The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2014); MMK Museum für moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2014); Albertina, Vienna (2014); Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2014); Serpentine Galleries, London (2013); Kunsthalle, Zürich (2012); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2012); Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris (2010); Le Consortium, Dijon (2008); Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2004); École Régionale des Beaux-arts de Nantes (2000); MAMCO, Geneva (1999) and Villa Arson, Nice (1993). Notable recent group exhibitions include Carte blanche à Anne Imhof, Natures Mortes, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2021) and She-Bam Pow POP Wizz ! Les Amazones du POP at MAMAC, Nice (2020).