Sherrie Levine’s bronzed Caribou Skull, 2006, combines the artist’s signature appropriative and autobiographical sources into a single, visually-arresting object. Though her practice spans decades and media, as a sculptor, Levine is best known for her reinterpretations of Modernist works such as Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain and Man Ray’s Fortune, the former of which, like Caribou Skull, casts a visual icon of modernism in bronze.

Caribou Skull recalls Georgia O’Keeffe’s skull paintings, such as Summer Days, 1936, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, which were inspired by the artist’s experience of the American Southwest. But Levine is not simply copying O’Keeffe’s work; not only does she transform the medium, from painting to sculpture, but she adds her own layer of interpretive meaning to the iconic skull.

“I am interested in making a work that has as much aura as its reference. For me the tension between the reference and the new work doesn’t really exist unless the new work has an artistic presence of its own.”
—Sherrie LevineIn 1997, Levine began to divide her time between New York and Santa Fe, the latter being O’Keeffe’s own Southwestern home base, too. The two artists’ interpretations of the Southwest, separated by seventy years, are simultaneously mutual and disparate. Both artists land on the motif of the animal skull, but where O’Keeffe’s skull paintings poignantly represent the force of nature over the individual, Levine’s Caribou Skull conjures up the capitalist excess of gilded luxury items, the particularity of scientific specimen collection, and the bravado of masculine hunting trophies.

Georgia O’Keeffe, Summer Days, 1936, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Image: © Whitney Museum of American Art / Licensed by Scala / Art Resource, NY, Artwork: © Georgia O'Keeffe Museum / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

The confusion and conflation of potential meanings in Levine’s version of the skull is intentional: “I’m interested in representing two opposing, idealized notions of nature,” she explains. “I’m always trying to collapse the utopian and dystopian.”ⁱ The cast of Caribou Skull halts the natural process of decay, and, simultaneously, immortalizes it, in a distinct, iconic visual of a bare, bronze skull.

ⁱ Sherrie Levine, quoted in Sherrie Levine: Mayhem, exh. cat., eds. Johanna Burton and Elisabeth Sussman, New York, 2012, p. 181
- Provenance
  Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
  Acquired from the above by the present owner
- Exhibited
  Alcoitão-Cascais, Ellipse Foundation Contemporary Art Collection, Listen Darling... The World is Yours, October 11, 2008–August 30, 2009 (another example exhibited)
  London, Whitechapel Gallery, Keeping it Real: An Exhibition in Four Acts from the D. Daskalopoulos Collection (Act 1: The Corporeal), June 10–September 5, 2010 (another example exhibited)
- Literature
  2008 Biennial Exhibition, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2008, p. 169 (another example illustrated)
  Sherrie Levine: MAYHEM, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2012, p. 33 (another example illustrated)