Sherrie Levine

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.