Sherrie Levine (Born 1947 in Hazleton, PA) is a multimedia artist who works in photography, drawing, painting, and sculpture, among other materials, to create pieces that challenge deeply rooted notions of artistic authenticity, originality, autonomy, the purity of medium, and immutability.
Untitled (Gold Knot: 6) is one of Levine’s series of knot paintings (the name is a pun on “not painting”). Each of these works uses the common building material of plywood, which is composed of many thin layers of wood glued together. Plywood is often used to build crates for artworks, though here the everyday material becomes the material support of a painting. Levine paints in gold over the naturally occurring knots within the wood, a process that again conflates high and low culture, granting a seemingly banal material aesthetic relevance and material worth.
