Appropriation Artist Sturtevant Has Died (1926–2014)

Sturtevant. Haring Tag July 15 1981 (1985). Photo: Prallen Allsten. © Sturtevant.

The American artist Elaine Sturtevant, who went simply by “Sturtevant,” has died in Paris, Artforum.com reports. Born in Ohio in 1926—though Artforum claims she was born in 1930, and the Museum of Modern Art lists her birth year as 1924—she moved to New York in the 1960s, and then on to Paris, where she had been based for many years at the time of her death. She began carving out a reputation for her pieces playfully appropriating and critiquing the work of big-name male artists of the moment, from James Rosenquist, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and Robert Rauschenberg in the 60s to the likes of Keith Haring, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, William Wegman, and Frank Stella more recently.

The recipient of the Golden Lion at the 2011 Venice Biennale and the Kurt Schwitters Prize for Lifetime Achievement from Hanover’s Sprengel Museum in 2013, she had several high-profile solo shows in recent years, including at the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris in 2010 and the Serpentine Gallery last year. She shows with Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in New York and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris.

At the time of her death she was preparing a major solo show at MoMA in New York, which is due to open on November 9.


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