Cindy Sherman / Falling Fictions
dal 15/9/2015 al 9/4/2016
Segnalato da
15/9/2015
Cindy Sherman / Falling Fictions
me Collectors Room - Olbricht Foundation, Berlin
Works from the Olbricht Collection: on view 65 photographs by Sherman including works from almost all periods of her career. Contemporary "Falling Fictions", a group show that takes its shape from a text by Francesco Pedraglio.
Cindy Sherman
Works from the Olbricht Collection
The forthcoming exhibition ‘Cindy Sherman – Works from the Olbricht Collection’ will be on view at me Collectors Room Berlin from 16 September 2015, on the occasion of Berlin Art Week, and will feature 65 photographs by the artist. Including works from almost all periods of her career, the collection provides a remarkable overview of the entire body of work.
Variously casting herself as an ingénue at the sink in black-and-white of the 1950s, a gold-blonde ‘Maria Lactans’ with a vacant expression and plastic breast, or an aging upper-class beauty wearing far too much jewelry and much too much makeup, American artist Cindy Sherman is a master of masquerade. Throughout her career she has simultaneously acted as her own actress and photographer, subject and object. And yet her portraits do not represent actual personalities. Instead they paraphrase social and cultural stereotypes with the aim of deconstructing them through the prism of cinema, classical painting, or advertising.
The artist became widely known in the 1970s with her black-and-white series ‘Untitled Film Stills’, in which she embodied a range of stereotypical female figures from the 1940s and 1950s, posing in what appeared to be movie stills. The 1980s brought not only a shift into colour and large formats, but, with her popular ‘Centerfolds’, her major breakthrough. Provocatively evocative of Playboy magazine angles and lighting, the series showed women in various states of mysterious emotional crisis. This enigmatic mood also dominated the ‘Fairy Tales’ (1985) and ‘History Portraits/Old Masters’ (1988–1990), in which Sherman recreated and distorted characters and scenes from the world of fairy tales and classical painting, often with the help of visible prostheses and puppets. Oversized teeth, plasticky blond hair, and a homemaker’s simplicity embodied the figures in her next series, ‘Hollywood/Hampton Types’ (2000–2002), while the humorously uncanny side to masquerade was captured in ‘Clown’ (2003–2004), which culminated in the sad, vulgar portraits of ageing ‘Society Ladies’ four years later. In all her series, Sherman presents us with a subtle analysis of contemporary cultural tropes, draws attention to the power of symbolism and the struggle of the individual against collective stereotype.
Cindy Sherman, now 61, has created an unmistakable and seminal body of work that broke new ground in photography. Her artistic legacy is one of the most important oeuvres by any artist of the modern day.
The exhibition has been curated in close collaboration with Cindy Sherman in person.
An extensive exhibition brochure has been published to coincide with the show, containing 96 pages, 69 illustrations, and texts by Thomas Olbricht – ‘My Personal Experiences with Cindy Sherman and Her Art’ – and Sarah Sonderkamp – ‘Encyclopaedia of Stereotypes’, priced €14.80. Also available to visitors is a free app featuring a video tour through the exhibition and more details on the works on display. As ever, guided tours are available to school groups, incl. practical workshops on the theme of ‘role-play and persona’. Our accompanying programme of events includes the screening of the film ‘Office Killer’ (1997), directed by Cindy Sherman, as well as expert talks. For further event details, please check our website closer to the date.
At the same time the gallery Sprüth Magers Berlin will be opening its own exhibition ‘Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Cindy Sherman, Rosemarie Trockel’ (17 Sept–21 Oct 2015 / opening: 16 Sept, 18:00–21:00). The group show will feature new works by Sherman from 2015, in which the artist brings together for the first time her own works from different periods in her career and superimposes them together on a single picture plane.
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Falling Fictions
The exhibition ‘Falling Fictions’ and the accompanying publication are the product of a collaboration between me Collectors Room Berlin / Olbricht Foundation with the London Metropolitan University and the Whitechapel Gallery as part of the Master’s degree in ‘Curating the Contemporary’. This is the fourth time that the Olbricht Foundation has invited young curators to develop their own ideas and perspectives on the Olbricht Collection and to curate a show for me Collectors Room Berlin as part of their final-degree module. The exhibition will be opened on the 16th of September, on the occasion of Berlin Art Week, and will be on show until November, 15.
Previous exhibitions in the series have probed the uncanny, the act of play, and the individual as a cabinet of curiosities. In the latest instalment of the collaboration, the three-strong student team – Amy E. Brown, Alejandro Alonso Diaz, and Rosie Snaith – have chosen the theme of metafiction.
Metafiction is originally a literary device, a story about the writing of a story that makes its readers a simultaneous part of the story as it unfolds. In an exhibition context, metafiction purposefully encourages the viewer to form their own conclusions and connections, reacting to their environment and the artworks surrounding them. For the three young curators metafiction is a strategy to approach the objects in the Olbricht Collection, as a fine line between reality and fiction, and to reveal the way they incarnate stories within stories.
‘Falling Fictions’ takes its shape from a commissioned text by artist and writer Francesco Pedraglio. In his story an object begins to fall. As it falls, it falls through thirteen Heavens and nine Underworlds before coming to rest, finally, on Earth. Throughout the process of falling, and in each layer, the object changes form, shifting to become something else, both physically and conceptually, gathering new meaning. Told in three voices – The Voice of the Room, the Chorus and The Voice of the Night – the tale gradually picks up pace, reaching a crescendo akin to the collision an object might make on the floor of the exhibition room, where it lands fully-formed.
An accompanying publication has been published to coincide with the show, containing 80 pages, 37 illustrations, text (de/en) by Amy E. Brown ‘Falling through the Olbricht Collection’, Alejandro Alonso Díaz ‘A Constellation of Enigmas’, Rosie Snaith ‘A Dialogue, A Monologue, A Metafiction’ and an interview with Francesco Pedraglio, priced €12,50.
On Saturday, 19.09. on 4 pm a curators tour through the exhibition with Amy E. Brown, Alejandro Alonso Díaz and Rosie Snaith will take place. (Curators tour free of charge, entrance to the exhibitions 7€, reduced 4€, registration for the curators tour under info@me-berlin.com).
Featured artists:
Doug Aitken, Joseph Beuys, KP Brehmer, Bazon Brock, Al Chang, Hansjoachim Dietrich, Marcel Dzama, Slawomir Elsner, Claire Fontaine, Imi Giese , KH Hödicke, John Isaacs, Ragnar Kjartansson, André Kertész, Imi Knoebel, Bernd Lohaus, Konrad Lueg, David Ostrowski, Blinky Palermo, Francesco Pedraglio, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Diter Rot, Reiner Ruthenbeck, Gerhard Rühm, Jean-Paul Sartre, Tomas Schmit, Gavin Turk, Wolf Vostell, Lawrence Weiner, Stefan Wewerka, Lambert Maria Wintersberger, WOLS and objects from the Wunderkammer.
Press contact at me Collectors Room Berlin / Olbricht Foundation:
Tina Volk Tel +49 30 860085-114 Fax +49 30 860085-120 presse@me-berlin.com - volk@me-berlin.com
me Collectors Room Berlin / Olbricht Foundation
Auguststrasse 68, 10117 Berlin, Germany
Opening hours:
Tuesday – Sunday 12pm-6pm