Sturtevant Johns Figure Two, 1991

Johns Figure Two (1991) is a powerful example of Sturtevant’s repetitions of the works of other artists, which she recreated from memory throughout her career. Jasper Johns’s Figure Two (1962), the source of Sturtevant’s repetition, belongs to his prolific body of work that takes numerical figures as its subject to foreground artistic methods, materials and techniques.

The questions of seriality and repetition explored in Johns’s Figure works are ideas that Sturtevant extends through her own reimagining of the iconic artwork. She says, ‘when you realise it’s not a Johns, you’re either jolted into immediately rejecting it, or the work stays with you like a bad buzz in your head.’ Sturtevant consequently understands Johns Figure Two to have a disruptive force that challenges the conceptual structures of creativity and originality in artmaking.

 Sturtevant: Dialectic of Distance, which retraces the artist’s recreation of The Store (1961) by Claes Oldenburg,is currently on show at Thaddaeus Ropac, London until 29 October 2022.