Simon Lee Gallery Hong Kong is proud to announce its inaugural exhibition, a solo presentation of work by American artist Sherrie Levine.

Sherrie Levine is at the forefront of a generation of artists that became identified during the 1970s and 1980s with the term ‘postmodernism’. Employing a diverse scope of media and materials, she has consistently eschewed the modernist prioritisation of authenticity and originality in favour of repetition, reference and seriality.

Levine’s interrogation into notions of authenticity has always been both highly complex and conceptually driven. Her works range from replications of early photographs to readymades to the creation of three-dimensional objects from two dimensional sources, and each serves to undermine Walter Benjamin’s contention that mechanical reproduction poses an obstruction to the auratic presence of a work of art.

For her exhibition at Simon Lee Gallery Hong Kong, Levine continues her conceptual act of quotation. The four, cast bronze javelina skulls on view recall a 2007 exhibition at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in which the artist exhibited a series of cattle skulls that made clear reference to early paintings by O’Keeffe. Located in the gallery, the works also make reference to the everyday, and bring nature into a recontextualised art environment.

Alongside these skulls, Levine will show a postcard collage. Consisting of a repeated detail from the Babylonian Ishtar Gate as reconstructed in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, the work alludes to a site which is in itself an allusion to its original.  And yet, in its repetition, the postcards additionally become an allusion to themselves, with seriality prompting a sense of both desire and detachment.

Following the success of her major retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the exhibition at Simon Lee Gallery Hong Kong marks the first commercial presentation of Sherrie Levine’s in Asia.

Sherrie Levine was born in Hazelton, Pennsylvania in 1947. She has held several solo exhibitions in major institutions in both the United States and Europe, including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. (1988), Kunsthalle Zürich (1991), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1991 and 2009), Philadelphia Museum of Art (1993), Portikus, Frankfurt (1994), Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1995), South London Gallery (1996), MAMCO, Geneva (1996 and 1999), Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld (2010), and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2011). Levine divides her time between New York and Santa Fe.