Since 1964 American-born, Paris-based artist Sturtevant (b.1930) has repeated works by her contemporaries, from Andy Warhol to Claes Oldenburg and Joseph Beuys. Made from memory and with the same methods as the original, Sturtevant's repetitions are eerily similar, if not almost identical. Through this subversive approach, Sturtevant divorces an artwork from its visual image to investigate its conceptual meaning and value.

At the heart of her work is the question: to ask: what makes a particular artwork from the past relevant in the present? Sturtevant herself succinctly described in a lecture titled 'Shifting Mental Structures' delivered at Frankfurt Museum für Moderne Kunst in 2004: "The brutal truth of the work is that it is not copy. The push and shove of the work is the leap from image to concept. The dynamics of the work is that it throws out representation. It is this leap that severs a work from its original time and place of making."