Sherrie Levine was born in 1947 in Hazleton, Pennsylvania. She grew up in St Louis, Missouri, and studied painting and printmaking at the University of Wisconsin from 1965 to 1973. In 1975 she moved to New York. Her earliest works are distinctly feminist. At the time she also worked as a commercial photographer. She had her first solo show in 1977 at the 3 Mercer Street Store. In the early 1980s she frequented artists’ circles around Jeff Koons and David Salle. Levine began making reproductions of works by important American photographers like Walker Evans, along with drawings after Egon Schiele and Kasimir Malevich, watercolours after Henri Matisse and Fernand Léger and lithographs after Edgar Degas. She reduced all these to the same format, and exclusively used works by male artists. In this way she “de-heroicised” the patriarchy of the art historical canon. Her works were seen at documenta 7 in 1982, in the Whitney Biennale in 1985, 1989 and 2008 and in numerous solo exhibitions. Sherrie Levine lives and works in New York and Santa Fe.
