Lot 30 email save

SHERRIE LEVINE, Untitled (Lead Knots: 7), 1988

Sign In to see what this sold for

Untitled (Lead Knots: 7), 1988
Metallic paint on wood in artist's wooden frame. 52 1/8 x 42 1/8 in. (133.4 x 107 cm). Signed, titled and dated "Sherrie Levine #7 1988" on the reverse.

PROVENANCE Donald Young Gallery, Chicago; Mary Boone Gallery, New York
EXHIBITED Chicago, Donald Young Gallery, Sherrie Levine, January 13 - February 18, 1989
"The knot paintings are simply plywood panels—a cheap and easily available material—on which the artist has marked, with the most minimal of gestures, the plugs that replace the missing knots. Encased in shadowbox frames and displayed as "paintings" in the most traditional of modern formats, the panels can be read as a comment on art's status as a commodity—that a painting is only another ready-made, an allusion to the found objects of Marcel Duchamp. Looking beyond the frame and glass to the images themselves, other interpretations become possible. The wood grain may refer to nature, highlighting of the knotholes to the arbitrary, since chance determined their placement and size. The painted plugs can be read as funny or touching, suggesting raindrops or tears. By painting the plugs, Levine emphasizes that something else once filled them, suggesting absence. This absence is the subject of these paintings, as it had been in much of Levine's previous work. The shapes of the knotholes present a decidedly female imagery. Gilded or painted then framed and put behind glass, they suggest traditional symbols of female sexuality—desirable but unattainable. This series thus suggests a link between absence as the subject of her work, desire for possession, and unfulfilled sexual longing,"  (P. Rosenzweig, "Sherrie Levine: Objects of Desire," Sherrie Levine: Art at the Edge, Washington DC, 1988, p. 10).

View Phillips de Pury & Company next auction.

Similar lots up for auction