Sherrie Levine: Pie Town

Sherrie Levine’s work engages many of the core tenets of postmodern art, in particular, challenging notions of originality, authenticity, and identity. Levine rose to prominence as a member of the Pictures Generation, a group of artists centred in New York in the late 1970s and 1980s whose work examined the structures of signification underlying mass-circulated images, and in many cases directly appropriated these images in order to imbue them with new, critically inflected meaning. Since then, Levine has created a singular and complex body of work in a variety of media (including photography, painting, and sculpture) that often explicitly reproduces artworks and motifs from the Western art historical canon.

On view for the first time in this exhibition will be After Russell Lee: 1-60 (2016), a continuation of Levine’s ongoing practice of photographing reproductions of artworks, begun in the early 1980s, and her largest grouping of works to date. Lee was a lesser-known contemporary of Walker Evans—one of Levine’s earliest and most recurrent subjects—and was also a photographer contracted by the Farm Security Administration (FSA).