Sturtevant Johns Target with Plaster Casts , 1999

The American artist Sturtevant is best known for her repetitions of the works of other artists, which she recreated manually from memory. Her Johns Target with Plaster Casts (1999) can immediately be identified with Jasper Johns’ Target with Plaster Casts (1955), an important early example of his targets which, together with the American flag, would become one of his most radical and recognisable motifs.

For Johns, the target was a way of painting ‘things the mind already knows’, an idea that Sturtevant took a provocative step further in her repetitions of artworks the viewer already knows. As she said, ‘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’. The disparities between versions encourage the viewer to look beyond their surface similarities and ‘trigger thinking’ about the underlying conceptual structure of art.

Sturtevant’s Oldenburg Store (1967) is currently exhibited at Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris, until 11 June 2022.