Exceptional Works: Sherrie Levine

Levine rose to prominence as a member of the Pictures Generation, a group of artists based in New York in the late 1970s and 1980s whose work examined the structures of signification underlying mass-circulated images, and, in many cases, directly appropriated these images in order to imbue them with new meaning. As the critic and novelist Gary Indiana observed in a T Magazine feature, “These pictures revealed how contrived, unnatural and seductive the originals actually were... [and] created a nervous sense of how representation operates in the everyday world—almost subliminally much of the time, tapping into myths and illusions sunk deep in our brains.”

Levine’s Caribou Skull is part of a group of works based on the skulls of cattle, caribou, and antelope that further derive from the American artist Georgia O’Keeffe’s famous desert paintings featuring animal skulls. At once readymades and still lifes, these uncanny facsimiles, with their highly polished, reflective surfaces, stand in contrast to the material reality of the actual object. Bridging art-historical reference points, the skull is also one of the most recognizable motifs since the Renaissance—with broader iconographic resonances.