Comebacks are the pastime of fading starlets, nipped, tucked, puffed to perfection and wheeled out in front of a no-longer adoring public in order to win them over once more. They are notoriously hard to pull off, and the cost of failing to invest the old and overly familiar with a lost novelty is high. For that reason, a comeback is usually a one-off, and since success rules out the need for repeat performances, it is not the most likely of activities in which to specialise, excel or even make the means of a career. However, the notion of a comeback can be used to think through Sturtevant's ongoing practice of carefully remaking iconic artworks by an all-male line-up of art stars, including Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella and Andy Warhol, which she began in the 1960s - often before these figures gained broader recognition.¹ Taking her 1986 'comeback' exhibition as my point of departure, I will extend the logic of this show so that the tactic of the comeback can be tracked throughout her career, with the aim of demonstrating that a practice that depends on the pre-existing is not necessarily a retrospective exercise but, as in Sturtevant's case, can also be an action oriented to the future

Sturtevant's famous comeback took place in 1986 at White Columns, New York - her first solo show since her 1974 exhibition at Onnasch Gallery (also in New York) of remakes of works by Joseph Beuys, after which she ceased producing and exhibiting art. In what has become an undeniable allusion to Marcel Duchamp's exchange of art for chess, she has