Elaine Sturtevant

Elaine Sturtevant (1924–2014) was an American artist whose practice of reproducing other artists' work constituted one of the most rigorous investigations of originality and authorship in postmodern art. Beginning in 1964, she made works after Johns, Warhol, Duchamp, and Beuys, often using their techniques, at a moment when this had no theoretical framework and was routinely dismissed. Warhol, famously, gave her his silkscreens. Her work is now understood as anticipating the frameworks of appropriation and simulacra, demonstrating that meaning lies in repetition as much as in the object — a contribution recognised with the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the 2011 Venice Biennale.