Dan Duray plowed into the market for Sherrie Levine’s work now that she’s moved to globe-spanning international sales machine, David Zwirner. Nonetheless, Levine’s work has some liquidity limitations as Duray illustrates below:
Andrew Massad, an international director for contemporary art at Christie’s who specialises in that generation of artists, points out that where her contemporaries reformatted popular culture, Levine’s work was more concerned with art history, which is a harder sell to private collectors. The six editions of La Fortune (After Man Ray) (1990), recreating Man Ray’s pool tables without pockets painting, all went to museums when they debuted at Mary Boone Gallery in 1990.
One of her most famous series, After Walker Evans, in which Levine photographed works by the Great Depression photographer, is not available for sale at all. In 1994, when the Evans estate raised copyright issues about the works, Levine donated the whole series to the estate. All of it is now owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
That is not to say the rest of her work isn’t sought after. The director of Paula Cooper Gallery, Steve Henry, says: “Careers go up and down, but over the course of our 17 years working with her, we saw a very sustained arc that was consistently positive.”
Is now the time for Sherrie Levine’s market to take off? (The Art Newspaper)
