The Brooklyn Rail

When Sturtevant (1924–2014) presented her first retrospective The Brutal Truth at the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt in 2004, she did more than simply assemble a survey of her work. In collaboration with then-director Udo Kittelmann, she orchestrated a profound institutional détournement: the museum’s permanent collection was entirely removed and replaced with Sturtevant’s repetitions of works that mirrored those in the museum’s collection. In so doing, she accomplished more than merely staging a comprehensive exhibition. She subsumed the museum’s infrastructure, forcing it to host a ghostly double of itself. It was a gesture both radical and unsettling in its implications about authorship, institutional authority, and art historical narratives.

This same logic recurred throughout her career. Sturtevant often considered the context of the site where she was exhibiting. For example, in her 1974 Various Studies for Beuys Actions, Objects and Films at Onnasch Gallery in New York—a space instrumental in introducing Joseph Beuys to American audiences—or her 1990 solo exhibition at Rhona Hoffman Gallery in Chicago, where she presented her versions of Frank Stella’s “Black Paintings” series. In these instances, Sturtevant didn’t simply repeat the works of these artists; she simulated the discursive and material conditions of a Beuys or a Stella exhibition. Her artistic gesture was both invisible and yet powerfully disruptive. It’s hard to imagine such an operation today. What would it mean to remake a Cameron Rowland or Park McArthur exhibition in 2025? The result would likely provoke the same mixture of discomfort and outrage that Sturtevant’s early repetitions of Claes Oldenburg, Jasper Johns, or Andy Warhol elicited in the late 1960s.

Sturtevant: The Echo of Innovation, curated by Jimena Blázquez Abascal at the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo (CAAC), brings a familiar problem back into focus: how to present an artist whose practice so forcefully depended on context within the static framework of a survey. This difficulty was already evident in Double Trouble, Sturtevant’s 2014 retrospective at MoMA, which was mounted shortly after the artist’s death. Though Sturtevant was involved in this show early in the process, the final exhibition lacked the parasitic intimacy and institutional subversion that defined her most potent work. Instead, it marked the beginning of a wave of posthumous presentations in which curators, unable to replicate her strategies, defaulted to simple object selection. Disconnected from their referents, these works were transformed into aestheticized relics. They were also ironically complicit in the very art-market dynamics Sturtevant sought to critique.

At CAAC, Blázquez Abascal demonstrates a certain awareness of these pitfalls. The exhibition is organized thematically: Pop art repetitions are grouped together, including two Johns flag paintings (both 1970), a Study for Rosenquist’s Spaghetti & Grass (1965–66), a Lichtenstein Girl with Hair Ribbon (1966–67), and a Study for Warhol’s Marilyn (1973). These are followed by rooms that create quasi-exhibitions of Marcel Duchamp, Warhol, and Robert Gober, executed in a way that Sturtevant might have done herself. This curatorial approach gestures toward her original methods, though it risks reducing them to a kind of museological pastiche.

Alongside other works, including two Joseph Beuys repetitions in front of a long row of Duchamp Fresh Widow works (all 1992) and two black Stella’s tucked into a corner, is Re-Run (2007), a moving video installation on a rotating platform that projects a dog endlessly running across the gallery walls. Diverging from the artist’s usual practice of repeating works by others, this work was a key to this exhibition: as someone who was incessantly accused of “stealing” from other artists, she saw herself as a sort of criminal, who like the dog, was always “on the run.” Reinforcing the idea of the artist as criminal is the inclusion, on an exterior wall of the building, of Sturtevant’s Duchamp Wanted poster (1992), which positions the artist as a fugitive with a two thousand dollar reward for her capture.

I was pleased to encounter such a comprehensive Sturtevant exhibition in Seville, as it’s uncommon to find shows like this one outside major US cities or the usual European art hubs. This decentralization is refreshing, opening up Sturtevant’s work to new audiences and creating space to explore underexamined aspects of her practice. And yet, the show inevitably prompts the question: do we really need another Sturtevant exhibition like this? If we are to exhibit her work meaningfully, we must take more seriously the context specificity that is central to her approach. Only then can we fully grasp the force of her gestures and properly situate her within the history of conceptual art, along with other artists who challenged the conditions and structures of the exhibition itself. Sturtevant still seems insufficiently placed within this discourse, perhaps due to the particular social milieu she navigated. Her work, however, merits deeper attention for its potential to further expand theories around site-specific practices and the history of institutional critique.

The most compelling moment of the exhibition occurs in the former chapel of the convent that houses the CAAC. Here, Blázquez Abascal installs two works, Félix González-Torres Untitled (America, America) (2004) and Félix González-Torres Untitled (Blue Placebo) (2004), in a spiritual setting still charged with Catholic symbolism. Her curatorial gesture appears aimed at layering a queer political charge onto a site historically aligned with religious authority, producing a palpable tension between sanctity and subversion. In doing so, she attempts, like many curators before her, to “do a Sturtevant” by inhabiting the artist’s originality and reflecting the institutional frame back onto itself. This is, arguably, Sturtevant’s most enduring legacy: enabling the conditions for such critical reflection. That said, I would have preferred to have seen Félix González-Torres Untitled (Go-Go Dancing Platform) on its own in the chapel, a choice that would have more directly conveyed Sturtevant’s true interest: the “silent power of art.”