Though Elaine Sturtevant’s work prefigured ’80s-style appropriation (Mike Bidlo, Sherrie Levine, Philip Taaffe et al.), her role has never been fully recognized. Indeed, she remains one of those unclassifiable contemporary figures who seems perpetually out of sync with their moment.

Picking up and developing an element that was present in her first New York show, Sturtevant devoted her entire recent exhibition to Andy Warhol’s “Flower” paintings. Twenty-five years after her first show in Paris, Sturtevant remains remarkably faithful to her original position. Though her intentions have remained

These are very silent paintings, silent in a way that has nothing to do with calm. Actually, they’re not paintings at all, but painting shapes compactly worked in sand and dirt and scrap metal. As such, they don’t describe, they don’t narrate, they don’t orchestrate their earthy colors and textures; they just appear there, before us, as markers of time and of a certain seething rage. Time is in the cracks and the rust that has come to pattern the surfaces; the rage goes deeper, like the occasional scratches and scrawls that have been added by hand, or the nails driven into the edges of the metal