Cindy Sherman: Anti-Fashion
Falckenberg Collection, Hamburg-Harburg
7 October 2023 - 3 March 2024
Untitled #133, 1984
© Courtesy the Artist, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart
© Cindy Sherman, Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Untitled #410, 2003
Privatbesitz
© Cindy Sherman
Untitled #462, 2007/2008
Privatsammlung Europa
© Cindy Sherman , Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
The American artist Cindy Sherman (*1954 in New Jersey) is one of the most important and internationally successful contemporary artists. In her photographs, she stages herself in a wide range of roles that skewer entrenched ideals and stereotypes in a manner that is as playful as it is critical. Cindy Sherman finds inspiration in various forms of visual culture: cinema, television, advertising, magazines, art history, fairy tales, the Internet, and social media act as catalysts for a multifaceted body of photographic work in which fashion is a constant.
With around 50 works spanning five decades, the exhibition ANTI-FASHION takes an in-depth look at the fascinating dialogue the artist maintains with the fashion world. Since the 1980s, Cindy Sherman has been drawing on a number of commercial commissions from renowned fashion houses and designers such as Chanel and Stella McCartney as well as international fashion magazines such as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar as a constant source of inspiration. By the same token, the artist influences and stimulates the aesthetics of the fashion world and continues to inspire an entire generation of photographers.
Untitled #588, 2016-2018
© Cindy Sherman, Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Untitled #602, 2019
Sammlung Gilles Renaud
© Cindy Sherman, Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Cindy Sherman’s provocative photographs do not convey the glamour, sex appeal, or elegance that we commonly associate with fashion. Instead, they show characters that are anything but desirable and run counter to the fashion world ideals of flawlessness. Last, but by no means least, the exhibition reveals the subject of fashion as the starting point for the artist’s critical examination of aspects of identity, sex, gender, and age. Sherman’s myriad characters demonstrate the artificiality and mutability of identity, which appears – now more than ever – to be selectable, (self-)constructed, and fluid.
With national and international loans as well as exclusively selected material from the artist’s New York archive, the exhibition is the first to be devoted to the subject of fashion in Cindy Sherman’s work.
The show is accompanied by a selection of photographic and artistic positions from the Falckenberg Collection – including works by John Baldessari, Karla Black, Monica Bonvicini, Richard Prince and Robert Longo.
The exhibition was curated by Dr. Alessandra Nappo, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart and realized by the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart in cooperation with Cindy Sherman’s studio in New York and her gallery Hauser & Wirth and will be shown at the FOMU – Fotomuseum Antwerp afterwards.
FALCKENBERG COLLECTION
Phoenix Fabrikhallen, Wilstorfer Strasse 71, Tor 2, 21073 Hamburg - Harburg
