Sherrie Levine — Pie Town — Exhibition Announcement Card, David Zwirner, London, 2017

Exhibition announcement card
Approx. 21 × 14.8 cm
Offset print on card stock; artwork reproduction to recto, exhibition details to verso
Published by David Zwirner, London
Exhibition dates: 4 October – 18 November 2017
Condition: very good; light handling wear and minor surface marks consistent with storage

Issued for a solo exhibition by Sherrie Levine at David Zwirner, London. The card reproduces a detail from After Russell Lee: 1–60 (2016), Levine’s reworking of historic documentary photographs originally made by Russell Lee during his work for the Farm Security Administration in the 1940s.

The image depicts Faro and Doris Caudill in Pie Town, New Mexico, photographed in October 1940. In Levine’s version, the original documentary image re-enters circulation as a new object: digitally translated, enlarged, and repositioned within the context of contemporary art. Rather than producing an image from nothing, Levine works through transfer, repetition, and displacement.

Since the late 1970s Levine has repeatedly questioned the stability of authorship and originality through acts of appropriation. Existing images are not simply reused but placed under pressure. Ownership, historical authority, and artistic identity become unstable categories. The gesture is small and direct: take an image already embedded in culture and ask what changes when it appears again.

Within a New Rare register the invitation performs a similar operation. One image passes through multiple systems — documentary record, archive, artwork, exhibition support, printed card. Authorship remains active but temporarily unsettled.

Original period item. Shipping and handling included in the listed price.