Sherrie Levine

Sherrie Levine was born on April 17, 1947, in Hazleton, Pennsylvania. She studied at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, earning a BA in 1969 and an MFA in 1973, roughly eight years at the same institution by her own account. After working as an art teacher in Berkeley, California, she moved to New York in 1975 and was included, along with a small group of contemporaries, in the 1977 exhibition Pictures at Artists Space, New York, the show that gave the Pictures Generation its name.

Levine's breakthrough body of work, Untitled (After Walker Evans), begun in 1981, consisted of straightforward photographic reproductions of Evans's Depression-era photographs, presented as her own work and raising direct questions about authorship, copyright, and the value assigned to an image versus its maker. She extended the same strategy across other artists and mediums in subsequent decades, including painted still lifes after Gustave Courbet, bronze recastings referencing Duchamp's Fountain, and sculptural works after Brancusi. Her practice moved fluidly between photography, painting, and sculpture while consistently returning to the act of copying as its subject.

Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Portikus in Frankfurt, and Museum Haus Lange in Krefeld, culminating in the 2011 to 2012 survey Sherrie Levine: Mayhem at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She has been represented by David Zwirner since 2015, and her work continues to be presented by Paula Cooper Gallery in New York and Xavier Hufkens in Brussels; she showed earlier with Metro Pictures, which closed in 2021. She lives and works in New York.

Critical writing on Levine has centered consistently on her role in defining appropriation as a serious critical strategy rather than a novelty. Her inclusion in the 1977 Pictures exhibition placed her at the origin of a movement that reshaped how critics discussed authorship in the 1980s, and Untitled (After Walker Evans) became one of the most frequently cited works in debates over copyright and originality in contemporary art. That critical standing was reaffirmed institutionally by the Whitney Museum's 2011 to 2012 retrospective, Sherrie Levine: Mayhem, which surveyed four decades of her work across mediums. Commentary on her more recent output, including the 2025 Aspen Art Museum exhibition covering 1977 to 1988, continues to treat her early photographic and object-based appropriations as the foundation for everything she has made since.

Levine's highest publicly documented auction result is Untitled (Sign), which sold for USD 962,500 at Phillips New York on June 30, 2026. Market data providers do not fully agree on the details of her top results: an earlier report cites an identical figure for a 2012 sale of a different work, and at least one database indicates a sculpture reaching a somewhat higher price, so this total should be read as an approximate high rather than a single, fully reconciled record. She has been represented by David Zwirner since 2015, and her secondary market spans photography, painting, and sculpture, with realized prices for sculptural works generally running higher than for works on paper or paintings.

Levine's market is comparatively thin relative to her museum footprint: auction volume is modest and results vary by medium, with sculptural pieces generally commanding the strongest prices. There is no published catalogue raisonne, so provenance research relies on gallery records, exhibition history, and the artist's representation through David Zwirner. Collectors should treat any single auction result, including her 2026 auction high, as a data point from a market with relatively few comparable transactions and some disagreement among data providers, rather than as a smooth trend line.