Elaine Sturtevant

Société is pleased to present a solo exhibition by the American artist Sturtevant. The show is devoted to her iconic series Warhol Flowers. A radical iconoclast, Sturtevant became notorious in New York art circles for “making her work the work of other artists,” as Jill Johnston reported in the Village Voices in 1967. The result was one of the most radical and perplexing oeuvres of the twentieth century. 

Elaine Sturtevant was a maverick. Her “repetitions” of artworks by male contemporaries often induced a sense of disorientation in their viewers. As she was fond of saying, her works “create vertigo.” Sturtevant worked in real time, engaging with and absorbing the works of other artists at the time that they were being produced. She had an uncanny ability to capture the most important aesthetic break throughs of her time, honing in on practices that would eventually become integral to the western canon of modern and contemporary art, not in retrospect, but as they were happening. Although her work was met with much resistance during her time, her conceptual strategy stretched the Duchampian ideal to a radical conclusion—thereby raising pressing questions about the nature of authorship, authenticity, originality, repetition, and difference.