After Piet Mondrian: 1-15, 1983 is a series of 15 colour photographs of catalogue reproductions of abstract grid compositions by the Dutch artist. This piece is a seminal example of Levine’s early works of appropriation from the context of her contemporaneous reproductions of paintings by eminent male artists. Levine’s reproductions and recontextualisations, which are neither originals or copies, radically question the concept of originality. Her simultaneous engagement with and rejection of art historical traditions is reflected in a statement in which she describes herself as a “still life artist—with the book plate as [her] subject”:

“I consider myself a still-life artist—with the bookplate as my subject. I want to make pictures that maintain their reference to the bookplates. And I want my pictures to have a material presence that is as interesting as, but quite different from the originals.”¹

The work After Piet Mondrian: 1-15, 1983, has now itself become a pictorial source within Levine’s oeuvre. Four decades later, the artist uses this work as an index for her paintings After Piet Mondrian, made in 2023 and 2024. Levine potentially produces three painterly renderings for each photograph, one in colour, one in black-and-white and one in inverted colours. Two of these are shown in this exhibition.

The most recent works in the exhibition are two After Francis Picabia paintings. Here the artist takes an illustration from a Francis Picabia catalog dedicated to the artist’s late work, in particular his dot paintings. In the exhibition there is both a colour-version that corresponds to the original and an inverted version of the same painting.

In her reproductions, Levine affirms possible colour and formal differences. Repetition and the creation of relations, both art-historical and within her own oeuvre, reveal the non-identical as the actual substance of Levine’s work. Of greater interest than the attributions of original or copy or before and after are the differences (contextual, historical, material, etc.) that emerge in relation to one another and undermine the solidification in representations.