NEW YORK—New work by Sherrie Levine will be on view in a one-person exhibition at Paula Cooper Gallery, from 29 March through 26 April, 2003. The show will consist of cast bronze and glass sculpture and a series of paintings on plywood.

In the front gallery, Sherrie Levine will exhibit a series of six identical bronze steer skulls. Levine has spent much of the past six years in the American Southwest and this new series makes reference to her experience there, citing in particular Georgia O’Keefe’s paintings of bleached animal bones in the desert.

Levine will also present a new series of Knot Paintings, which are bare pieces of plywood with paint applied on the knots and framed behind glass. Levine began her first series of Knot Paintings in 1984 and has continued exploring this format over the years. The paintings in this exhibition extend the reference to O’Keefe, alluding to the eroticism of her work.

Finally, Levine returns to the paired structure (a format she has favored, both in painting and sculpture), showing gnome sculpture pairs based on Gartenzwerge, in cast bronze and glass. Entitled Avant-Garde and Kitsch and Repetition and Difference the sculptures are wry homages to seminal texts by art theorist Clement Greenberg and philosopher Gilles Deleuze, respectively.

At the conclusion of Difference and Repetition, Deleuze writes:

"Repetition—even in its most mechanical, quotidian, habitual, stereotypical forms—has a place within art… For the only esthetic problem is how to insert art into everyday life. The more our daily life appears standardized, stereotyped, submitted to the accelerated reproduction of consumer goods, the more art must become part of life and rescue from it that small difference which operates between levels of repetition, making habitual consumption reverberate with destruction and death; linking cruelty to inanity; discovering, beneath consumption, the chattering of the schizophrenic; and reproducing esthetically, beneath the most ignoble destructions of war (which are still processes of consumption), the illusions and mystifications which are the real essence of this civilization–so that, in the end, Difference can express itself… even if it’s only in the form of a contradiction here or there, thereby liberating the forces needed to destroy this world."

Sherrie Levine lives and works in New York and Santa Fe. Her work has been the subject of one-person exhibitions at venues such as the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C., the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Kunsthalle Zürich, the Rooseum Malmö, Sweden, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Menil Collection, Houston, and the MAMCO Geneva, Switzerland. This is her fourth exhibition at Paula Cooper Gallery. Levine will also present new work at Jablonka Galerie in Cologne, opening on April 24.

For more information, please contact the gallery: (212) 255-1105 or
info@paulacoopergallery.com