Drawing Double Reversal

Comprehensive monograph

This publication accompanies the first survey devoted to Sturtevant’s drawing. The American artist, born in Lakewood, Ohio, lived and worked in Paris and was a figure of outstanding significance for the art history of the second half of the 20th century. She received the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011, and she was awarded with the prestigious Kurt-Schwitters-Prize in Hannover, Germany, in 2013. This monograph provides a focused look at the artist’s graphic work from 1964 to 2004.

Research into Sturtevant’s graphic oeuvre reveals that her early drawings from the 1960s are key to understanding the artist’s radical conceptual work—especially her drawings from 1965 and 1966, the so-called “composite drawings.” Over the course of the past 50 years, Sturtevant has developed what is perhaps the most radical practice of her generation, determined by a rigorous and insistent conceptual approach. She was concerned with more than the mere reception of art; her aim was to change mental attitudes. She disconcerted and provoked the spectator and the art world in general to equal degrees by repeating original works by contemporary artists. Astonishingly quickly after the “originals” are made, she used them as source and catalyst, her intentions being to “expand and develop our current notions of aesthetics, probe originality, and investigate the relation of origins to originality and open space for new thinking” (Sturtevant).

This publication has been produced on the occasion of Sturtevant’s exhibition at MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main, Albertina Museum in Vienna, and Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin.