Sturtevant

Peder Lund is delighted to present a solo exhibition of works from the iconic «Warhol Flowers» series by the American artist Sturtevant (1924-2014). Sturtevant created one of the most interesting oeuvres in the 20th century. By following a unique approach that consisted of creating stunning repetitions of the artworks of her contemporaries and presenting them consciously as independent works, she questioned the foundations of our understanding of art and her oeuvre confronts us with a fundamental expansion to Duchamp’s concept of the readymade. The show includes 19 unique works from 1970 that have never been shown in Scandinavia before.

While some of her repetitions were essentially exact copies of the artworks she chose to work with, others were recreated manually from memory. Through the artistry of Sturtevant’s detailed repetitions, the works she referred to can be easily identified, but their meaning was far from being a simple duplication, as her intention was never to create just a close resemblance, but to explore through her work topics such as authorship, authenticity, and originality. Issues that are of the highest relevance in our digital age, which is defined by the endless stream of images and their recombination.

Sturtevant‘s first solo exhibition at the Bianchini Gallery in 1965 featured her versions of artists’ works that we now see as icons of their time. It demonstrated her remarkable ability to repeat important artworks shortly after their creation, and it is clear that Sturtevant had a keen sense for quickly analyzing the qualities of an artwork and its cultural reception. Among the exhibited works were, for example, repetitions of Andy Warhol’s silkscreened flowers, which he had only started to produce in 1964 and a colorful, concentric square from Frank Stella’s Benjamin Moore series which he had begun in 1961.

Warhol’s oeuvre is especially linked to Sturtevant’s work since repetition, authenticity, and authorship are also key elements of his work, however, his implementation clearly differed from Sturtevant’s pursuit, as his quote perfectly illustrates. While Warhol’s factory operated under the premise that he delivered the concept of the work to his assistants, who were then responsible for the work’s execution, therefore his name became the brand. Conversely, it was of utmost importance for Sturtevant to execute the work herself. Hence, her flower series, for which she used the same technical tools, demonstrates perfectly that each work will nevertheless differ. In the same way as the products of Warhol’s factory are original artworks because of the conceptual idea that lies within them, Sturtevant’s works are absolutely unique, exactly because they depict the same thing but with a different meaning.

Born in Lakewood, Ohio in 1924 as Elaine Sturtevant, Sturtevant moved to New York in the early 1960s and decided to use only her last name as an artist name. Besides her artistic education, she earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Iowa, followed by a master’s in the field from Teachers College of Columbia University. Later in her career, she held a professorship at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 2014, Sturtevant died in Paris where she had lived since the beginning of the 1990s at the age of 89.

Works by Sturtevant are held by renowned public and private collections, including Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.