Raysse Peinture à Haute Tension

Sturtevant is renowned for her intentionally inexact copies of works by iconic – male – 20^th-century artists, such as Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and in this case, Martial Raysse’s famous 1965 painting. She called her approach "repetition", presaging strategies of appropriation that would become widely used by artists in the 1980s. This act of repetition exposed one of the great ironies of Pop Art – the Warholian logic where (mass) reproduction in fact reinforced authorship rather than diminishing it. She not only challenged mythologies of authorship, but also questioned the notion of originality and ultimately art itself. As such, Raysse Peinture à Haute Tension enacts how an artwork is created, circulated, and canonised.