Sherrie Levine - Contemporary Art Part I New York Thursday, November 15, 2007 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Paula Cooper Gallery, New York; Devin Borden Hiram Butler Gallery, Houston

  • Catalogue Essay

    Sherrie Levine has been well known since the early 1980's for provocative work that challenges ideas about artistic authorship, authenticity and originality.The current lot, Parchment Knot: 5, 2003 refers literally to the painting of plywood knots with an acrylic paint color called Parchment. “The esthetics of the 8-by-4 sheet are, of course, functional in a bodyoriented sort of way (something one person can carry, etc.), but as a shape it is both ungainly and affecting, neither bed nor door yet somehow a convincing stand-in for the human figure.Visually, a knothole is a dark orifice in the flat sheet of the wood's skin but also the record of where a branch was sheared off. The plugs may thus be read as bandages for the wound left where phallus-branches have been severed, but they also suggest closed vaginal openings, bringing to mind female circumcision rituals in some African societies, where the labia are stitched shut. The groupings of plugs are, of course, random, but the 14 paintings had a calendrical association—two weeks—that made me think Levine was counting days.This and the "repaired" fleshiness of the wood grain seemed a quiet invocation of mortality,” (R.Taplin, “Sherrie Levine at Paula Cooper”, Art in America, July, 2003).

16

Parchment Knot: 5

2003
Acrylic on plywood in the artist's wooden and Plexiglas frame.
98 1/2 x 50 5/8 x 3 1/2 in. (250.2 x 128.5 x 8.9 cm).
Signed and dated “Sherrie Levine 2003 5” on the reverse.

Estimate
$150,000 - 200,000 

Contemporary Art Part I

15 Nov 2007, 7pm
New York