American artist Sherrie Levine rose to prominence in the early 1980s as a key figure in what Douglas Crimp called the ‘Pictures’ generation, a loose group of artists who appropriated and re-issued existing imagery from high and popular sources. Rather than creating new works, they believed the artist was not able to produce anything original, given their submergence in a world already full of pictures. Levine’s provocative series titled After Walker Evans (1981) was a major contribution to this moment. Here she boldly scrutinised notions of originality and truth by meticulously reproducing 1:1 scaled copies of printed versions of Walker Evans’s seminal photographs produced in Alabama during the Great Depression. By lifting these subjects, Levine delivered a definitively post-modern blow, described as a ‘feminist hijacking of patriarchal authority, a critique of the commodification of art, and an elegy on the death of modernism’. By inserting distance between us and Walker Evans, and of course his famous subjects, she turned attention to the production of meaning itself, putting pressure on the image as a vehicle of truth.

In 2014, Sherrie Levine produced a new series: African Masks After Walker Evans, this time reproducing images Evans produced for the Museum of Modern Art in New York’s 1935 exhibition African Negro Art. Evans’s images were produced on commission, when the Museum hired him to document the large collection of African masks recently acquired by the institution. Levine presented a set of twenty images that subsequently appeared in the book African Folktales and Sculpture. While initially appearing as a simple act of copying, the quality Levine obtained from her new set of photographic prints forces us to observe miniscule differences between the publication plates and the photographs from which they were made.

Levine’s works were brought to the Adam Art Gallery courtesy of the artist, Simon Lee Gallery, London and the Walker Evans Archive at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. This was the first time her work had been shown in New Zealand.

This exhibition was staged concurrently with Walker Evans: The Magazine Work, Sonya Lacey: Newspaper for Vignelli, and Patrick Pound: Documentary Intersect.