Sturtevant: El eco de la innovación Solo show at Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville

The Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Seville presents a retrospective of Sturtevant's work – the artist's first in Spain. Marking the occasion of the centenary of Sturtevant’s birth, this exhibition celebrates the work of the pioneering American artist, bringing together more than 40 works from major collections across the world, including the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, as well as the Pinault Collection, Paris. Ranging from her early repetitions of works by Andy Warhol, James Rosenquist, Roy Lichtenstein and Jasper Johns from the 1960s, to her later video works, passing by works from the 1980s and 90s inspired by the likes of Robert Gober, Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Beuys, the exhibition retraces the evolution of her groundbreaking practice.

Sturtevant’s repetitions, by memory, of artworks by her contemporaries are not copies, nor are they ‘a matter of distanced, allusive quotation’. Rather, as Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris curator Anne Dressen wrote on the occasion of Sturtevant’s major exhibition at the museum in 2010, they are ‘tools [...] for getting away from the surface to provoke thought’. Through her process, Sturtevant created rigorous studies on the artworks she repeated: on their making, their canonisation, their valorisation. In this sense, her work is situated at the juncture where the visual gives way to the conceptual. As Sturtevant explained: ‘The push and shove of the work is the leap from image to concept. The dynamics of the work is that it throws out representation.’