Skarstedt gallery opens exhibition about artistic appropriation

Fresh on the heels of Lernert and Sander’s presentation on creative mimicry at Design Indaba last week, Skarstedt gallery in London has opened a new photography exhibition titled Double Take which looks at the idea of appropriation by artists from the 1960s through to today, pushing visitors to consider ways in which images are often manipulated to shift our understanding of reality.

The gallery describes Double Take as “a re-framing, re-staging and re-presentation of appropriation in photography”, with work by emerging and established artists Anne Collier, Roe Ethridge, Robert Heinecken, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Richard Prince, Collier Schorr, Steven Shearer, Hank Willis Thomas.

So what does appropriation mean in this context? Well, according to one of Double Take’s contributing artists Richard Prince, who has been copying other people’s work since the mid ‘70s, "the great thing about appropriation is that even though the transformation reads as fiction, everybody knows that the source of the appropriation was at some point non-fiction (magazine, movie, etc), and it’s these sources, or elements of non-fiction, that gives the picture, no matter how questionable, its believable edge”. 

Double Take is at Skarstedt, London, until 22 April 2017.