This exhibition celebrates the centenary of Sturtevant’s birth and offers a compelling lens through which to understand the depth and rigor of the artist’s five-decade exploration into the nature of image, concept, and cultural memory. At its heart is Sturtevant’s 1995 rendition of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s Untitled (Go-Go Dancing Platform) (1991), a work emblematic of her talent for challenging the viewer to reconsider the very essence of an artwork, stripping away its outer image to lay bare the conceptual framework beneath.

Sturtevant’s practice of re-creating works by her contemporaries—each painstakingly committed to memory rather than mere duplication—served not as homage or mimicry but as a radical dissection of originality, authorship, and value. As Paris curator Anne Dressen once remarked, her repetitions were tools for “getting away from the surface to provoke thought.” By re-imagining works by the likes of Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and Frank Stella, she wasn’t content with re-presentation; she sought a transformative experience that was less a tribute and more an interrogation, moving from image to concept in one bold leap. Notably, Warhol, a figure equally captivated by the mechanics of replication, respected her work so profoundly that he reportedly quipped, “I don’t know. Ask Elaine,” referring to her when questioned about his method.

The 1966 repetition of James Rosenquist’s Spaghetti and Grass (1965), one of her earliest forays into repetition and part of her landmark European debut, is a striking reminder of Sturtevant’s defiant engagement with Pop art. Her early adoption of this practice came when many were wary of her methods. Yet, the significance of her approach would only intensify with time, challenging notions of ‘originality’ long-held sacred within the art world. The monumental 1990 Flowers silkscreen, a work by Warhol yet undeniably Sturtevant’s, looms large as an anchor in this exhibition, encapsulating the fruitful discord and dynamic dialogue her practice would sustain over decades.

Sturtevant’s engagement with Gonzalez-Torres’s Go-Go Dancing Platform extends her investigation into absence and presence. Here, her choice to restate Gonzalez-Torres’s emphasis on chance and disappearance only strengthens her thesis on the power of gaps and silences within art. The viewer encounters an empty, glowing platform, confronting not the spectacle of dance but its ghost. In re-presenting these absences, she acknowledges Gilles Deleuze’s notion of “difference” in Difference and Repetition, in which each iteration inherently signals a departure from what came before, provoking us to confront what lies beneath the veneer.

By the 1990s, Sturtevant’s attention shifted from these methodical repetitions toward a broader critique of image saturation in the digital age. Her video installation Elastic Tango (2010), an array of nine screens broadcasting fragments from various sources, is as frenetic as it is mesmerizing. This assault of looping, decontextualized imagery—nature documentaries clashing with cartoon animations, violent explosions juxtaposed with commercial gloss—embodies her later interrogation of a world in thrall to the “zip zap” of digital media. Here, she anticipates our current state of perpetual image bombardment, forcing us to confront the content of what we see and the conditions that shape our perception.

This exhibition is a timely commemoration, not merely of Sturtevant as an individual artist but of a vision that questioned the very foundations of contemporary art. By urging us to look beyond the obvious, question the surfaces, and plunge into the understructure, she reasserts the power of art as a space for provocation, contemplation, and, ultimately, change.