Image: A replica of a replica
Installation view of Sturtevant: Dialectic of Distance. Sturtevant Oldenburg Store at Thaddaeus Ropac London. 8 September – 29 October 2022. Photo: Eva Herzog. © Estate Sturtevant, Paris.
Featured in The Art Newspaper

A replica of a replica Thaddaeus Ropac gallery to recreate a 1967 work by the American artist Sturtevant, which near-copied Oldenburg's 1961 installation as a comment on authorship and originality.

27 Jul 2022
Ely House, London
By Kabir Jhala

(...) Sturtevant staged her copycat installation—billed on publicity posters as The Store of Claes Oldenburg, rather than by Claes Oldenburg—in a gallery several blocks from the original, and recreated the objects from memory, so they appeared as disconcertingly inexact replicas. She once said that her intention for doing so was to "create a sense of vertigo". Oldenburg attended the opening of Sturtevant's show at her invitation, but cut off contact with her from then on.

(...)  14 of the objects Sturtevant made for the Oldenburg tribute will be brought together on the 55th anniversary of its first staging. These include dresses, cakes and cigarette butts. They will be shown alongside The Dark Threat of Absence (2002), a video work in which Sturtevant re-enacts Paul McCarthy’s film Painter (1995), in which McCarthy himself poses as a version of Willem de Kooning.

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