Sherrie Levine valuation
Rephotographed Walker Evans, put her own name to the result, and made authorship itself the subject.
Sherrie Levine was born at Hazleton in Pennsylvania in 1947, grew up in St Louis, and studied at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
What a work by Sherrie Levine is worth
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Bio
Sherrie Levine was born at Hazleton in Pennsylvania in 1947, grew up in St Louis, and studied at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. She came to attention among the Pictures Generation in New York at the end of the 1970s, and in 1981 showed After Walker Evans: Evans's Depression-era photographs of a sharecropping family, rephotographed from an exhibition catalogue and presented as her own work. Similar series took Edward Weston and Eliot Porter as their source. The same logic has run through everything since: watercolours after reproductions of modernist paintings, check and knot paintings on plywood, and Fountain (After Marcel Duchamp), a polished bronze urinal of 1991 that questions originality in the very object that started the argument.
Her work spans photography, painting and sculpture, and the medium comes first in any valuation. The rephotographed series are gelatin silver prints made in editions, the bronzes and cast objects are editioned, and the paintings and watercolours are usually unique, so the edition number and the certificate are central — all the more because the images are, deliberately, copies, and a work's standing rests on its documentation rather than on what it depicts. Signature and edition details are usually on the verso or a label. Photographic prints are sensitive to light and handling, and the bronzes to surface wear. Her galleries hold the records of editions and exhibition history.
Pictures, Metro Pictures and the Brancusi casts
In 1977 Levine took part in Pictures at Artists Space in New York, curated by Douglas Crimp, with Robert Longo, Troy Brauntuch and Jack Goldstein, and After Walker Evans was shown at her solo exhibition at Metro Pictures in 1981. In 1984 she was in Difference: On Representation and Sexuality, with Barbara Kruger, Jeff Wall and Mary Kelly.
In 1993 she made cast-glass copies of Brancusi sculptures in the Philadelphia Museum of Art for Museum Studies. La Fortune (After Man Ray) was shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1991, and the Whitney gave her a survey, Mayhem, in 2011.
The Evans estate, The Bachelors and the monochromes
Levine took a BA in 1969 and an MFA in 1973 at the University of Wisconsin, and moved to New York in 1975. The Walker Evans estate regarded After Walker Evans as a breach of copyright and acquired the works to stop them being sold. Levine later gave the whole series to the estate, and it now belongs to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Three paintings from her series After Ernst Ludwig Kirchner were in the 1984 exhibition Difference.
The Bachelors (After Marcel Duchamp), of 1989, is six frosted-glass sculptures, each following one of the bachelor moulds in Duchamp's Large Glass and shown in its own vitrine. She chose polished bronze for Fountain to recall Brancusi. In 2010 she made the Crystal Skull series and eighteen Gray and Blue Monochromes based on Alfred Stieglitz's Equivalents. Newborn toured from the Philadelphia Museum of Art to the Menil Collection and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles between 1993 and 1995, and the Museum of Wisconsin Art showed After Russell Lee: 1-60 in 2025.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
