Card produced by Musée D’art Moderne et Contemporain, Geneva documenting Elaine Sturtevant’s work from the collection. Beuys La Rivoluzione siamo noi, 1988–1992, Tirage offset couleur, 97.8 × 53.5 cm, éd. 20/21.

The American artist Sturtevant is best known for her repetitions of the works of other artists, which she recreated manually from memory after having seen a piece that intrigued her. These can immediately be identified with the original, but they are not copies. The artists with whose work she engaged include her contemporaries in American Pop—Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, Andy Warhol and Tom Wesselmann – as well as Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Beuys, Frank Stella, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Keith Haring and Anselm Kiefer, among others. Her aim was not to achieve an exact replica, but rather to address notions of authorship, authenticity and originality that would later come to the fore in our own digital age, characterised by the endless circulation and recombination of images.