Sturtevant Eat the Outside to Light Up the Inside

In her breakout New York exhibition in 1965, Sturtevant (1924–2014) left critics and peers baffled by reprising works by contemporary artists such as Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, all of whom she knew personally. Ever since, her work has continued to provoke and challenge – or, as she would say, ‘push and shove’ – the ways in which contemporary art is produced, distributed and perceived.

In the years that followed, Sturtevant extended this radical strategy of repeating works, by hand and by memory, from the likes of Frank Stella to Keith Haring, Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Robert Gober. She did so to reach, as she put it, the ‘understructure’ of art, and to throw into critical relief such notions as recognition and repetition.

From the late 1990s, she began producing performative video works, which presciently anticipated the digital era of image saturation and what she saw as its dark threat of absence. Sturtevant’s work sets itself other goals than postmodernism’s questioning of history or the denunciation of our current visual overload. More profoundly, her practice uses repetition to ‘shift our mental structures’.

The exhibition at Raven Row samples a broad range of Sturtevant’s work. It includes a gallery of Warhols, a suite of rarely seen Krazy Kat drawings, photographic Muybridge studies, and Digital Click, a carnivalesque installation where visitors can choose to be photographed sitting on a cutout moon. A rug Sturtevant designed based on a piece by Keith Haring has been made especially for the exhibition.

This first institutional exhibition in the UK since Sturtevant’s death reveals how the artist’s radical conceptual practice continues to probe the power of images, and to mobilise the basic assumptions of aesthetics and visual pleasure. 

The exhibition is curated by Antony Hudek, in close cooperation with the Sturtevant Estate and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac.