About Sherrie Levine

These four images, each a pattern of twelve color rectangles, are computer-generated analytical reductions of paintings by four modern masters: Mondrian's Tableau No II, Kirchner's Potsdam Square Berlin, a Monet Rouen Cathedral, and L.H.O.O.Q., Duchamp's mustachioed Mona Lisa. The twelve-color woodblock prints in the portfolio Meltdown have been created by the artist by entering images of these paintings into a computer scanner that spatially quantizes and transforms them into the minimum number of pixels, thus determining each of the colors in the four prints. The result is a totally unrecognizable arrangement of colors. It is a work not of appropriation but of interpretation, albeit by interpretation through automation.

Since the 1980s, Levine has made a career out of appropriating famous works of art, sometimes by making new versions of them and placing them in different contexts, other times by “simply” photographing a photograph. Throughout her career, Levine has created art based on works by prominent male artists from the early 20th century in order to underscore the relative absence of women in the art world at that time.