New Sculpture
In the large room on the second floor, the New Sculpture exhibition by Sherrie Levine (1947, Hazleton PA) and Joos van Oost (1961, Deinze, Belgium) consisted of the nine tricycles of Hobbyhorses installed opposite the 24 coffee tables of Untitled (After Riedveld), two works from 1997. This collaborative piece shows Levine’s interest in what is at stake in reproduction. The tricycles continue her line of thinking from Shoe Sale of 1977, in which she reproduced seventy-five pairs of children’s shoes. Creating a multitude of objects, even more emotionally charged because they are linked to childhood, expresses the idea that their uniqueness is artificial, determined by their postproduction use. With Untitled (After Rietveld), we also see that it is not an object’s singularity that fetishizes it, but a change in material: Gerrit Rietveld’s wooden Lage Krat-tafel 1 from 1934 is transformed into a modular bronze sculpture. Changing the material removes its value as a usable object and turns it into a work of art.