SHERRIE LEVINE | Caribou Skull

Paula Cooper Gallery, New York Private Collection, Europe

Sotheby's Private Sales

Acquired from the above by the present owner 

Alcoitão-Cascais, Ellipse Foundation Contemporary Art Collection, Listen Darling… The World is Yours, October 2008 - August 2009 (edition no. unknown)

Exh. Cat., New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Sherrie Levine: MAYHEM, November 2011 - January 2012, p. 33 (text, edition no. unknown)

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate although the overall tonality is slightly cooler in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Close inspection reveals some small spots of superficial and unobtrusive tarnishing to the bronze in the deeper crevices of the cast, this is owing to the natural ageing of the bronze.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

Imposing in size and captivating in its spatial outreach, Sherrie Levine’s gold-plated bronze Caribou Skull represents one of the artist’s most iconic sculptural achievements to date. The present work draws from Levine’s experience of the desert in the American Southwest and cites in particular Georgia O’Keeffe’s skull paintings that were inspired by the same place but created seven decades earlier. As an artist best known for her appropriative engagement with known imagery, Levine came of age as one of the Pictures Generation artists alongside Barbara Kruger and Richard Prince. Since the late 1970s, she has referenced various artists, including Walker Evans, Marcel Duchamp, Egon Schiele, and Claude Monet throughout a myriad of two and three-dimensional media. Caribou Skull features a motif that Levine has ardently explored throughout her career and its sculptural manifestation impressively reveals her conceptual and artistic elaboration on the subject. Where O’Keeffe’s works of the same subject poignantly display the force of nature over the animal, Levine chooses an actual skull as maquette for an opulent, golden object that exemplifies the commercial desire and fetishistic culture of modern-day society. By juxtaposing the appropriation of a given motif with the contemporaneous experience at a given point in time, “… Levine suggests that history is not linear but rather exists in, and by way of, relationships. The ways in which we see and understand things, regardless of their origin, depends not only on their surrounding context but also on our own individual contexts” (Johanna Burton and Elisabeth Sussman, ‘Introduction’, in: Exh. Cat., New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Sherrie Levine: MAYHEM, 2012, p. 14). Levine re-writes history by appropriating images and objects that are deeply embedded in our shared cultural lexicon. By re-contextualising familiar sights and placing them within new environments, the artist purposefully interrogates our habit of automatically ascribing meaning to well-known images. Caribou Skull is thus not a simple appropriation of O’Keeffe’s art; rather, the animal skull is used as a fulcrum to explore the differences between Levine and O’Keeffe’s simultaneously mutual and disparate experience of the same environment. Whereas O’Keeffe’s paintings are powerful, painterly observations of animal decay in the face of nature’s force, Levine’s gold-plated zoomorphic remains convey the dominance of human covetous desire in an age of hyper-commerce and capitalism.

Levine’s practice has drawn from various sources including photography, sculpture, drawing, and painting. In her questioning of traditional notions of originality and authorship, the artist ultimately creates new meanings and content through a process of deconstruction. Typically antlered deer skulls are ubiquitous symbols of hyper-masculinity and the power dynamics of man over nature. Curator Johanna Burton has suggested that the present work in particular is “rendering the elemental, the primary, the archaic into fetish forms with new (and contradictory) genealogies redirecting their signifying capacities” (Johanna Burton, ‘Sherrie Levine, Beside Herself’, in: Ibid., p. 33). She continues by pointing out that “the ‘refound’ object enacts the truth that every iteration introduces something new into the world – getting us at once closer to the thing we approximate and yet holding us at yet another vantage from it” (Ibid.). The artificial appearance of the skull is emphasised by its luscious gold sheen; a luxurious materiality that heightens the dichotomy between O’Keeffe and Levine’s experience and interpretation of America. To O’Keeffe, the bones and skulls represented the desert’s enduring beauty and the strength of the American spirit. With Caribou Skull, however, Levine renders a powerful, contemporary iteration that ultimately manipulates O’Keeffe’s spirit of endurance. Passed through the lens of a commerce-driven and object-obsessed society, existential symbol is transformed into fetish object.