Cindy Sherman
dal 14/4/2009 al 26/5/2009
Segnalato da
14/4/2009
Cindy Sherman
Spruth Magers Lee, London
The colour photographs assembled are selected from a new series which develops Sherman's longstanding investigation into notions of gender, beauty and self-fashioning, and reveal a particular concern to probe experiences and representations of aging. A remarkable performer, subtle distortions of her face and body are captured on camera, leaving the artist unrecognizable as she deftly alters her features, and brazenly manipulates her surroundings.
Spruth Magers London is delighted to present Cindy Sherman's first UK
exhibition since 2007. The colour photographs assembled are selected from a new
series which develops Sherman’s longstanding investigation into notions of
gender, beauty and self-fashioning, and reveal a particular concern to probe
experiences and representations of aging. Working as her own model for more than 30
years, Sherman has developed an extraordinary relationship with her camera, and her
audience, capturing herself in a range of guises and personas which are by turn
alarming and amusing, distasteful and poignant. A remarkable performer, subtle
distortions of her face and body are captured on camera, leaving the artist
unrecognizable as she deftly alters her features, and brazenly manipulates her
surroundings.
To create her photographs, Sherman shoots alone in her studio, assuming multiple
roles as author, director, make-up artist, hairstylist, wardrobe mistress, and of
course, model. The idea and experience of getting dressed up and putting on a show
is central to Sherman’s practice, yet Sherman is also careful to closely
manage the detail of each performance. Every bulge of flesh, strand of hair, rouged
cheek or wrinkled brow is deliberately orchestrated to construct a vividly real yet
curiously inscrutable character. The tension between pathos and alienation which
Sherman’s figures evoke in the viewer are heightened by the contexts in which
they appear, always obviously staged and cleverly apposite. Her creations are
photographed in front of a green screen, and then digitally inserted onto
backgrounds which are shot and manipulated separately, scenarios which elaborate and
complicate the narrative constructed by Sherman’s garb and gaze.
Each of the women who feature in Sherman’s new exhibition share an acute
consciousness of glamour and social hierarchy, which is both disquietingly flagrant
and sardonically relevant to contemporary obsessions with image and status. In one
photograph (Untitled #466, 2008) the elegant and leisured affectation of a society
dame poised in her cloistered manor is subtly undermined by the detail of
Sherman’s performance; the stockinged feet wedged in to cheap plastic shoes do
not speak of the same pride or superiority as her character’s haughty glare.
In another work from the series, a woman distinguished by the shimmering and
infernal scarlet tones of her dress, lipstick and whites of her eyes stares out
boldly, almost intrusively, at the viewer. Similarly installed against an
aristocratic backdrop, the fearsome and ugly figure of Untitled #470 exemplifies the
ambivalent amalgam of fragility, defiance and faded glamour which animates the
scenes and personas created by Sherman in this new body of work. It is ultimately
impossible to fix any stable narrative in these works; different levels of pretence
and authenticity operate and interact to complicate any straightforward reading of
Sherman’s characters, or the stories they might tell the viewer.
Cindy Sherman’s work has been widely collected and exhibited by major museums
throughout the world since 1980. Major solo exhibitions include the Serpentine
Gallery, London and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in 2003, the San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1998, and MoMA in New York in 1997. She was also
the subject of an important retrospective in 2006 which travelled from the Jeu de
Paume in Paris, to the Kunsthaus in Bregenz, Austria, the Louisiana Museum of Modern
Art in Humlebæk, Denmark, and Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin. She has been the
recipient of a number of major awards over the course of her career, including the
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 1983 and the MacArthur fellowship in
1995. Her new body of work has been exhibited at Metro Pictures in New York and
Sprüth Magers Berlin, before coming to London. Cindy Sherman lives and works
in New York.
Image: Cindy Sherman, Untitled #470, 2008, Colour photograph
Private view: Wednesday 15 April 2009, 6 - 8pm
Sprüth Magers London
7A Grafton Street London W1S 4EJ
opening hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 10am - 6pm
and by appointment