Eric Doeringer reviewed in the New York Times!

Eric Doeringer took an unconventional route to this impressive solo exhibition. He became known first in the early 2000s as a Chelsea sidewalk vendor of paperback-size knockoffs of works by established contemporary painters like Christopher Wool and Lisa Yuskavage. It was hard to tell whether he was an opportunist catering to the tourist trade or a conceptualist mocking art-world commercialism.

This show makes clear that Mr. Doeringer, who has degrees from Brown University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, has been an ambitious sophisticate all along. The front room features well-made simulations of spot paintings by Damien Hirstand Marlboro cowboy ads by Richard Prince. The back room displays counterfeits of books by Ed Ruscha; a version of Charles Ray’s “All My Clothes” in which Mr. Doeringer appears in a different outfit in each of 16 photographs; and a video of the Empire State Building imitating Andy Warhol’s eight-hour film “Empire.” A set of photographs of orange balls up in the air against a blue sky recreates John Baldessari’s attempt to photograph tossed-up balls forming a straight line.

Mr. Doeringer is a latecomer to the art-about-art game, a follower in the footsteps of artists like Richard Pettibone and Sherrie Levine. His distinction is his focus not on canonical works of Modernism but on famous Conceptualist pieces that are themselves art about art. He is a meta-meta artist. But the meticulous care with which he produces his reproductions gives his enterprise a persuasive feeling of authenticity.

- Ken Johnson

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