Lee Friedlander: Christmas @ Deborah Bell Photographs, New York - Exhibition + Book published by the Eakins Press Foundation

Lee Friedlander: Christmas

Deborah Bell Photographs, New York

November 6, 2025 - January 10, 2026

Deborah Bell Photographs presents Lee Friedlander: Christmas, an exhibition of photographs by Lee Friedlander dating from 1958 to 2015, in collaboration with Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco and Luhring Augustine, New York. 

This exhibition also celebrates the release of Friedlander's most recent book, LEE FRIEDLANDER: CHRISTMAS, published by the Eakins Press Foundation, New York. Although many of the photographs on view are well known from their inclusion in Friedlander's previous books and numerous exhibition catalogues, and have appeared on the walls of museum and gallery exhibitions internationally, this publication features Friedlander's personal edit of photographs related to the theme of Christmas. As indicated by the Eakins Press Foundation, the book presents 106 beautifully reproduced photographs that span the artist's life, cover most of the United States, and give us a sweeping view of American culture by this renowned photographer of the social landscape. The exhibition features some 30 photographs selected from the book.

Lee Friedlander: Christmas

Afterword by Peter Kayafas

Eakins Press Foundation, 2025

Clth, 11.75 x 12.5 in. / 112 pgs / 106 b&w / 106 tritone

ISBN 9780871301055

Cover Photograph: Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934)  

San Angelo, Texas, 1997  

Gelatin silver print  sheet 20 x 16'“ (50.8 x 40.6 cm)  

© Lee Friedlander, Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco 

and Luhring Augustine, New York

Peter Kayafas, Director and President of Eakins Press Foundation, writes in the Afterword to the sumptuously illustrated book:

Whether or not you've celebrated Christmas at any point over the past seventy years--roughly the period covered by these photographs--you have no doubt encountered some of the things Friedlander shows us here....Is Christmas in America a religious holiday? A commercial precept? An ironic commentary? A misunderstanding? An indulgent blasphemy? All or none of the above? In these pictures, the only thing certain is that Christmas has provided an opportunity for the people's photographer to hold up a mirror--and make no mistake, it is Friedlander's mirror--to a diverse, flawed, inventive, preoccupied, and spectacular society.

DEBORAH BELL PHOTOGRAPHS

526 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001

www.deborahbellphotographs.com

Related Post:

Lee Friedlander: MARIA

Deborah Bell Photographs, New York , November 1, 2018 – January 19, 2019 

Bernard Plossu et Pierre Buraglio @ Galerie 8 + 4, Paris - Exposition 'Suivre Favignana'

Bernard Plossu et Pierre Buraglio

Suivre Favignana

Galerie 8 + 4, Paris

4 octobre - 20 décembre 2025

Pierre Buraglio, Favignana, 2009

Crayon sur papier, 21 x 30  cm

© Pierre Buraglio

Bernard Plossu, Favignana, 2008

Photographie noir & blanc, 24 x 30 cm

© Bernard Plossu

« On sait juste que depuis longtemps, instinctivement, l’on adore tous les deux les travaux l’un de l’autre. « Ensemble », cela ne peut que fonctionner ! ».

Bernard Plossu

L’exposition Suivre Favignana, que présente la Galerie 8+4, réunit enfin Bernard Plossu et Pierre Buraglio qui espéraient poursuivre dans un espace d’exposition un dialogue imaginé il y a de nombreuses années et sans cesse reporté. Elle met en scène de façon dynamique un ensemble de dessins, collages et photographies. Constituée d’œuvres inédites, certaines réalisées pour cette occasion, l’exposition se veut une ode à la substance de notre monde : fragments de paysages épurés chez l’un comme chez l’autre, surgissements d’architectures vernaculaires, objets saisis dans leurs dépouillements…

Il s’agit ici d’une conversation laissée depuis trop longtemps en suspens, qui soudain se cristallise dans de joyeux allers-retours, et dévoile une amitié forgée à distance, par le truchement des œuvres, des prises de positions et de conversations intenses lors de rencontres interminables. L’estime que l’un porte à l’autre fut longtemps affaire de circonstances, presque de hasards. Si Bernard Plossu se souvient d’une évidence devant les dessins de Pierre Buraglio lors d’une exposition en 1989 au Musée Réattu à Arles, Buraglio aime à mentionner le Musée du quai Branly comme moment inaugural de leur rencontre, marqué entre autres par un portrait photographique réalisé in situ par Plossu. L’affinité est aussi vagabonde lorsqu’ils évoquent, ébahis, leur amour de l’Italie, le sud, les îles Favignana et Ponza, certains villages oubliés de la Sicile que tous deux ont traversé avec pour unique bagage l’envie d’arrêter le temps et de rendre cette suspension palpable.

Cette exposition est née de cette passion commune qu’ils portent à une contrée où la pesanteur du soleil les pousse à la sobriété. Austérité dans les compositions de Bernard Plossu, économie du trait dans un paysage à peine esquissé chez Pierre Buraglio. Ce territoire méridional se révèle être un terrain de jeu trop étroit pour leurs aspirations qu’ils élargissent à d’autres lieux en France, mais aussi aux États-Unis, au Mexique ou en Espagne, pour Plossu.

L’exposition, qui présente une trentaine d’oeuvres pour chacun des artistes, s’impose comme un échange entre les territoires de la photographie et ceux du dessin ou du collage. Si Pierre Buraglio perçoit dans les images noir et blanc de Bernard Plossu une sorte de singularité à contre-courant d’une photographie couleurs, si bavarde et criarde, s’il reconnaît justement dans les œuvres de Plossu ce même souci humaniste qu’il ne cesse de décliner dans ses oeuvres, s’il croit qu’il y a là justement un rapport au monde que lui-même défend depuis si longtemps en affirmant que l’engagement politique débute en capturant l’inframince du monde, alors cette exposition est bien un manifeste en faveur d’une « abstraction discrète » comme aime à l’affirmer Bernard Plossu. Une abstraction refusant l’évidence du formalisme pour aller vers une métaphysique abordant des territoires qui ouvriraient sur la substance même du monde. Nul besoin d’y convoquer l’être humain. Un pan de mur, un nuage, un panneau indicateur ou un camion, un simple intérieur avec deux jarres pour tout mobilier, la solitude d’un arbre brulé par le soleil sont autant de motifs qui se répondent pour nous parler d’un monde que l’on ne sait plus voir. Notre univers est tout autant marqué par le permanent que par le transitoire et il semble possible, à condition de prendre un certain recul, de lier les deux ensembles.

Cette union prend chez Pierre Buraglio la forme de dessins, certains simples croquis, d’autres plus détaillés et aboutis. Un ensemble de vêtements sur un portant, une cheminée d’usine, un coin de mur ou un balcon d’une maison italienne, une colline abritant un hameau, un tronc noueux. Comme pour mieux magnifier cette perception du monde, Buraglio a imaginé pour l’occasion une série étonnante de collages. Parmi ceux-ci, il enchâsse, dans une logique de montage très épuré, des morceaux de cette réalité volée. Bernard Plossu y répond par un choix d’images noir et blanc au cadrage serré. Si la plupart s’amusent à capturer la lumière et lui donner un poids singulier, d’autres s’aventurent vers une déambulation du regard envers les choses les plus ordinaires du réel mais soudain illuminées par le regard du photographe. Dans ses fameuses Histoire(s) du cinéma, Jean-Luc Godard nous rappelait « une image n’est pas forte parce qu’elle est brutale ou fantastique, mais parce que l’association des idées est lointaine et juste ». Plossu, comme Godard, mais aussi Buraglio tentent dans leurs compositions de montrer un œil qui écoute le temps pour le suspendre, le mettre dans l’évidence de nos regards.

L'exposition "Suivre Favignana" est réalisée en partenariat avec les galeries Ceysson Bénétieres et Camera Obscura.

PIERRE BURAGLIO

Pierre Buraglio 

© Bernard Plossu

Pierre Buraglio, né en 1939 à Charenton-le-Pont, se forme à l’École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris en 1959. Après un séjour à New York en 1963, il produit ses premiers « Papiers » et « Recouvrements ». Proche de Claude Viallat, Michel Parmentier et François Rouan, il se sent alors proche du mouvement Supports/Surfaces naissant. Dans les années 1960, il compose des oeuvres à partir de chutes de tableaux qu’il juge mauvais. En 1968, il participe à « Salle Rouge pour le Vietnam » à l’ARC puis s’investit dans l’atelier populaire des Beaux-arts de Paris en produisant nombre d’affiches murales. Dans les années 1970, il produit ses premiers « Camouflages » puis la série « Dessins… d’après… autour… selon… » et les « Caviardages » qui le rendent célèbre. Bénéficiant de nombreuses expositions en institutions, il développe en parallèle les « Fenêtres » et les « Cadres » dans les années 1980. En France, Pierre Buraglio a exposé au CAPC de Bordeaux (1999), au Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon (2004), au Musée National d’Art Moderne (2008), au Musée Fabre à Montpellier (2009), au Musée du Louvre (2011). Il a également été présenté à la Biennale de São Paulo, à la Fondation Joan Miró (Barcelone)… Une vaste rétrospective s’est déroulée en 2019 au Musée d’art moderne et contemporain de Saint-Étienne Métropole (MAMC+). Pour la seule année 2025, l’oeuvre de Pierre Buraglio est exposée dans les musées des Beaux-Arts de Grenoble, d’Orléans et de Caen. Ses oeuvres sont présentes dans les principaux musées français et européens.

BERNARD PLOSSU

Bernard Plossu 

© Bernard Plossu

Né en 1945, Bernard Plossu appartient à cette génération française qui dans l’immédiat après-guerre révolutionne l’idée de la photographie. Au lieu de s’attacher à l’idée de reportage ou même d’instant décisif, Bernard Plossu développe dès le milieu des années 1960 une photographie du voyage où dans les contrées qu’il traverse – le Mexique (1965) puis l’Ouest américain (1967-1977), l’Afrique (1975) et l’Europe – il saisit une forme de suspension du temps. Humains, paysages mais surtout architectures ou simples objets, deviennent sous son regard des évocations de notre condition, des sortes de poèmes révélant l’inframince du monde ou ce qu’il nomme des « paysages intermédiaires ». Essentiellement en noir et blanc ses photographies tracent en creux une écriture intime qui loin d’être autobiographique atteste surtout d’un regard décalé, empreint de tendresse envers la richesse du réel. La considération dont il bénéficie dès les années 1970 l’entraîne à exposer dans les grandes institutions européennes et internationales (exposition itinérante aux États-Unis en 1987) et permet à ses images d’intégrer de prestigieuses collections. Depuis le milieu des années 1980, il a bénéficié de plusieurs expositions telle une rétrospective au Centre Pompidou en 1988, puis sous la direction de Gilles Mora, une deuxième qui circule quelques années plus tard en Europe (Salzbourg, Barcelone, Lisbonne, Paris), complétée en 1997 par celle de l’IVAM à Valence (Espagne). Il fut également présenté par la Maison européenne de la photographie (2015), aux Rencontres d’Arles (2016), et au musée Granet (2022). Il est également l’auteur de plus de 300 ouvrages sur ses photographies.

GALERIE 8 + 4

13 rue d'Alexandrie, 75002 Paris

www.bernardchauveau.com

Larry Sultan: Homeland Exhibition @ Yancey Richardson, New York

Larry Sultan: Homeland

Yancey Richardson, New York

October 30 – December 20, 2025

Yancey Richardson presents Homeland, an exhibition featuring photographs from Larry Sultan’s series of the same name and the third exhibition of his work with the gallery. In his expansive photographs of Latino day laborers set against the backdrop of a suburban California landscape, Larry Sultan explores the liminal spaces between actions, the moments that exist as time passes. Though he borrows from the tradition of landscape painting, with its presumption of order through perspective, Sultan’s photographs emphasize the indeterminate and the ambiguous instead, revealing the sense of possibility that remains embedded in the act of waiting. 

Over the course of a two year period Sultan drove to lumber yards and hardware stores in the Bay Area and Simi Valley, California, where every day hundreds of men waited for temporary employment. Rather than hire them as laborers, Larry Sultan employed them as actors, working with them to choreograph their movements in landscape on the outskirts of suburbia, rehearsing and doing take after take, creating picture after picture. Just as they originally occupied the marginal and transitional zones within the landscape—those that remain overlooked and passed over—Larry Sultan cast these men in similar roles for Homeland, asking them to carefully pose and sit, to cast their gaze outward from the picture frame. Instead of depicting dynamic motion or dramatic action, Larry Sultan created meticulous tableaux that express the interrelated experiences of looking for, leaving and coming home. The notes of longing and melancholy that are present in these photographs are counterbalanced by one of emergent possibility, where the familiarity of the banal can give way to the unforeseen and unexpected.

It was in the act of exploring truths in storytelling, notions of identity and the influence of home that Sultan returned to time and again in his work, regardless of subject matter or setting. The lasting imprint of his childhood and the spaces that defined it—the empty fields behind strip malls and the borderlands of the LA river that ran behind his home in the San Fernando Valley—were areas that represented a small and diminishing stretch of refuge that existed just outside the boundaries of private property. By investigating these spaces in Homeland, Larry Sultan sought to complicate the stereotype of what suburbia was and can be with pictures suff used with anticipation and a quiet reverence for the ordinary.

LARRY SULTAN grew up in California’s San Fernando Valley, which became a source of inspiration for a number of his projects. His work blends documentary and staged photography to create images of the psychological as well as physical landscape of suburban family life. Sultan’s pioneering book and exhibition Pictures From Home (1992) was a decade long project that features his own mother and father as its primary subjects, exploring photography’s role in creating familial mythologies. Using this same suburban setting, his book, The Valley (2004) examined the adult film industry and the area’s middle-class tract homes that serve as pornographic film sets. Katherine Avenue (2010), the exhibition and book, explored Sultan’s three main series, Pictures From Home, The Valley, and Homeland alongside each other to further examine how Larry Sultan’s images negotiate between reality and fantasy, domesticity and desire, as the mundane qualities of the domestic surroundings become loaded cultural symbols.

Larry Sultan’s work has been exhibited and published widely and is included in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon Guggenheim Museum, the Tate Modern, the National Gallery, London, the Stedelijk Museum, Musée de l’Elysée, Centre Pompidou, the National Gallery of Art, DC, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where he was also recognized with the Bay Area Treasure Award in 2005. Larry Sultan served as a Distinguished Professor of Photography at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1946, Larry Sultan passed away at his home in Greenbrae, California in 2009.

The exhibition will be on view in the project gallery. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, October 30 from 6–8PM.

YANCEY RICHARDSON

525 West 22nd Street, New York, NY

www.yanceyrichardson.com

Il Color Exhibition @ THE POOL NYC, Palazzo Fagnani Ronzoni, Milan - First chapter of the exhibition "Times of the Gaze. 90 Years of Italian Photography in Two Acts"

Il Color

First chapter of the exhibition "Times of the Gaze. 90 Years of Italian Photography in Two Acts"

THE POOL NYC at Palazzo Fagnani Ronzoni, Milan

October 8 – December 20, 2025 

Mario Cresci

From the serie A Tutto Tondo, 2007

Vincenzo Castella

Monte San Giacomo Salerno, 1982

THE POOL NYC at Palazzo Fagnani Ronzoni in the heart of Milan's historic center (Via Santa Maria Fulcorina, 20) presents the exhibition Il Colore, the first chapter of the series I tempi dello sguardo. 90 anni di fotografia italiana in due atti (Times of the Gaze. 90 Years of Italian Photography in Two Acts), which features two exhibitions at different but consecutive times, bringing together a total of 194 works by 55 Italian and international artists who have shaped the history of 20th-century photography.

The project's title alludes to the artists' ability to mark an era, a "time" in our history, with their gaze, and at the same time invites us to rediscover the time—away from the excesses of today's visual production—to rediscover the extraordinary talents that have made Italian photography unique, even internationally.

The first event, curated by THE POOL NYC, presents the experiences of those masters who have made the use of color one of their most characteristic features.

Luigi Ghirri

Olanda - Otterlo, 2009

Luigi Ghirri

Parma, 1984

Franco Fontana

Paesaggio - Italia, 1995

The exhibition, comprising 115 photographs, features, among others, works by Luigi Ghirri, master of light and quiet, by Giovanni Chiaramonte who travels to Venice to capture the city's most hidden corners, and by Franco Fontana who shapes the landscape through colour, from the geometric urban visions of the 1970s to the abstract sensuality of the Piscina series, to Italian landscapes transfigured into fields of colour.

Guido Guidi

Pomposa, 1983

Mario Schifano

"Arte istantanea – 3000 fotografie di Mario Schifano" 

22 Aprile - 19 Giugno. Foto-n 2403, 1994

Mario Schifano

"Arte istantanea – 3000 fotografie di Mario Schifano" 

22 Aprile - 19 Giugno. Foto-n 2413, 1994

The exhibition continues with Guido Guidi who makes photography an act of waiting, with Mario Schifano, irreverent and experimental, who works with the same creative freedom with which he interpreted painting, while Paolo Gioli , the alchemist, although starting from sensitive photographic material, considers it a "material" to be shaped and manipulated.

If on the one hand, Leonardo Genovese captures fragments of dreams through a fierce and revealing light, the Lucanian “controra”, which cuts into bodies and deforms appearances, Rita Lintz, on the other hand, transforms waste into relics: rags become carpets and waste becomes beauty.

Jiang Zhi 蒋志

Rainbow n 2, 2006

The first act of the exhibition is completed with photographs by international artists, including Denis Brihat, Wim Delvoye, Claus Goedicke, Béatrice Helg, John Hilliard, Tracey Moffatt, Jiang Zhi, Wang Qingsong .

During the exhibition period, Palazzo Fagnani Ronzoni hosts a series of collateral events, such as meetings, talks, book presentations, and themed evenings with artists, historians, and photography critics.

Artists : Denis Brihat, Vincenzo Castella, Giovanni Chiaramonte, Mario Cresci, Wim Delvoye, Cosimo Di Leo Ricatto, Franco Fontana, Vittore Fossati, Andrea Galvani, Leonardo Genovese, Luigi Ghirri, Luca Gilli, Paolo Gioli, Claudio Gobbi, Claus Goedicke, Guido Guidi, Béatrice Helg, John Hilliard, Jiang Zhi, Luisa Lambri, Rita Lintz, Marcello Mariana, Tracey Moffatt, Brigitte Niedermair, Wang Qingsong, Mario Schifano, Davide Tranchina, Luigi Veronesi, Cuchi White, Silvio Wolf, Marco Zanta.

The second episode, scheduled from January 16 to February 28, 2026 , will be dedicated to Black and White , with works by authors such as Renato Di Bosso, Alfredo Camisa, Mario De Biasi, Mario Giacomelli, Antonio Biasiucci, Franco Vaccari, Mario Cresci, Luigi Erba, Andrea Galvani, in dialogue with international photographers, including Elliott Erwitt, Jan Groover, Horst P. Horst, Michael Kenna, William Klein, Minor White.

The Pool NYC | Palazzo Fagnani Ronzoni 

Via Santa Maria Fulcorina, 20, Milano

www.thepoolnewyorkcity.com

David Lynch Exhibition in Prague @ DOX Centre for Contemporary Art - "Up in Flames"

David Lynch: Up in Flames

DOX Centre for Contemporary Art, Prague

Through 8 February 2026

David Lynch in Prague, 1996 

Photo by Karel Cudlin 

© 400 ASA

David Lynch 

Man Laughing, 2013 

DOX, Up In Flames Exhibition

© The David Lynch Estate, Courtesy Item éditions, Paris

David Lynch 

Playing with Fire, 2015 

DOX, Up In Flames Exhibition

© The David Lynch Estate, Courtesy Item éditions, Paris

The DOX Centre for Contemporary Art in Prague, the Czech Republic’s largest institution dedicated to contemporary art, presents the exhibition event of the year in its main hall: artistic work of American master of cinema DAVID LYNCH.

The project, on which DOX is collaborating with the David Lynch Estate, Pace Gallery, and Item éditions, is curated by Otto M. Urban. David Lynch: Up in Flames is the first presentation of Lynch’s art in the Czech Republic.

In the main spaces of DOX over four hundred works of art are on display – from drawings, photographs, lithographs, woodcuts, and watercolours to short experimental and animated films created by the director. The works span all of Lynch’s creative periods, from his early days in the late 1960s all the way to 2024.

“I consider it a small miracle that we are finally opening the exhibition. Without the enthusiastic cooperation of everyone involved, we could not have pulled off a project like this. Unfortunately, David Lynch, who oversaw the preparations for the exhibition from the very beginning, will not see the final result. Nevertheless, I hope that he would be satisfied with the exhibition, which I see as a tribute to a great artist and a great man,” says Otto M. Urban, the curator of the exhibition.

David Lynch

View into the exhibition Up in Flames, DOX, Prague

Photo Jan Slavik © DOX 

David Lynch

View into the exhibition Up in Flames, DOX, Prague

Photo Jan Slavik © DOX 

David Lynch

View into the exhibition Up in Flames, DOX, Prague

Photo Jan Slavik © DOX 

Deliberations regarding the project gradually developed over many years, and an important condition for its realisation was establishing direct contact with the artist himself. The first serious discussions about a David Lynch exhibition at DOX took place in the spring of 2024, when the David Lynch Studio (now the David Lynch Estate) and Pace Gallery joined the project. Patrice Forest of Item éditions in Paris was instrumental in facilitating this connection.

However, the preparations were unexpectedly interrupted by the news of David Lynch’s sudden passing on 16 January.

“David and I spoke about this show the day before he passed. He loved the images he’d seen of DOX and was looking forward to seeing his art in that space. He had confidence in Otto, and he was excited to share his work with the people of Prague. When he died, it seemed like the world stopped turning,” says Michael T. Barile from the David Lynch Estate.

David Lynch 

My House is on Fire - Modern Device, 2013

DOX, Up In Flames Exhibition

© The David Lynch Estate, Courtesy Item éditions, Paris

David Lynch

View into the exhibition Up in Flames, DOX, Prague

Photo Jan Slavik © DOX

David Lynch

View into the exhibition Up in Flames, DOX, Prague

Photo Jan Slavik © DOX

David Lynch

View into the exhibition Up in Flames, DOX, Prague

Photo Jan Slavik © DOX

David Lynch - Works on paper

The main axis of the exhibition consists of works on paper, which Lynch considered to be autonomous artworks in their own right. He said that drawing helped him to capture ideas that he could later develop into films, paintings, or objects.

David Lynch studied painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. It was there that he had a vision of a moving painting, and in 1967 this vision became the basis for his first film, Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times). Lynch drew throughout his career, and in his artistic work he was fascinated by all manner of different materials and surfaces.

A major part of the exhibition consists of works on loan directly from the David Lynch Estate in Los Angeles, but the project also includes a number of works (lithographs and photographs) which he created at Item éditions in Paris.

David Lynch 

Small Stories, 2014

DOX, Up In Flames Exhibition

© The David Lynch Estate, Courtesy Item éditions, Paris

David Lynch 

Small Stories, 2014

DOX, Up In Flames Exhibition

© The David Lynch Estate, Courtesy Item éditions, Paris

David Lynch

View into the exhibition Up in Flames, DOX, Prague

Photo Jan Slavik © DOX

Artist David Lynch

David Lynch (1946–2025) had a prolific nearly six-decade-long career, which spanned an extensive range of artmaking, including painting, drawing, photography, printmaking, sculpture, music, and film.

He wrote and directed critically acclaimed films such as Eraserhead (1977), The Elephant Man (1980), Blue Velvet (1986), Lost Highway (1997), Mulholland Drive (2001), Inland Empire (2006), and the television series Twin Peaks (1990–91) and Twin Peaks: The Return (2017). While studying painting at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia in the late 1960s, David Lynch envisioned his first “moving painting”, a multidimensional composition beneath a moving projection titled Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times) (1967). This multimedia work marked Lynch’s first foray into video and filmmaking. His remarkable career touched on subjects of the organic body and industrial sites in various states of decay, describing a deeper human experience both beyond and within the everyday. Often depicting scenes with an eye towards surrealism and mystery, Lynch’s work balanced on the porous divide between the body and the world it inhabits.

Lynch’s work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions. Retrospectives of his work include The Air Is on Fire: 40 years of Paintings, Photographs, Drawings, Experimental Films, and Sound Creations at Fondation Cartier in Paris (2007), which then travelled to La Triennale di Milano (2008), the Ekaterina Cultural Foundation in Moscow (2009), and Gammel Strand in Copenhagen (2011); Between Two Worlds at QAGOMA in Brisbane, Australia (2015); Silence and Dynamism at the Centre of Contemporary Art in Toruń, Poland (2017–18); and Someone Is in My House at the Bonnefanten in Maastricht, Netherlands (2018–19). In 2014, a survey of Lynch’s work entitled The Unified Field was presented at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where the artist previously studied painting.

David Lynch: Up in Flames - Organisational Team

The exhibition Up in Flames is curated by Otto M. Urban. The organisational team consists of Leoš Válka, Michaela Šilpochová, Jan Slavík, and Anna Bárová from DOX, Anna Skarbek and Michael T. Barile from the David Lynch Estate, and Genevieve Day from Pace Gallery.

Michael T. Barile and Anna Skarbek from the David Lynch Estate and Patrice Forest from Item éditions in Paris made significant contributions to the exhibition. Michael T. Barile, Anna Skarbek, and Patrice Forest were the guests of honour at the exhibition’s opening ceremony. The graphic design of the exhibition and the accompanying catalogue was entrusted to Robert V. Novák. The music was arranged by Marcel Bárta.

Authors of the exhibition David Lynch: Up in Flames

Curator Otto M. Urban

DOX, Exhibition David Lynch, Up in Flames 

Photo Jan Slavík © DOX

Otto M. Urban – Head curator of the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art in Prague, where he has prepared numerous exhibitions, including his latest project, David Lynch: Up in Flames. Since the early 1990s O tto M.Urban has focused on Czech and international art from the turn of the twentieth century, especially symbolism and decadence, as well as contemporary art.

Michael T. Barile

DOX, Exhibition David Lynch, Up in Flames 

Photo Jan Slavík © DOX

Michael T. Barile – Executive assistant to David Lynch and employee at Asymmetrical Productions from 2008 to 2025. Michael T. Barile is an American film producer and writer who worked on several of Lynch’s projects, including Twin Peaks: The Return (2017), Twin Peaks: Missing Pieces (2014), and What Did Jack Do? (2017) as well as numerous other commercials, music videos, and short films. He currently works for the David Lynch Estate.

Anna Skarbek

DOX, Exhibition David Lynch, Up in Flames 

Photo Tomáš Cindr © DOX

Anna Skarbek – An American visual artist and educator who began working with David Lynch as assistant art director on his 2006 film INLAND EMPIRE. She subsequently worked with him on commercials, music videos, and experimental films, and she built and maintains the database that inventories all of Lynch’s artworks. Anna Skarbek has organised fifteen international museum exhibitions of Lynch’s work, overseen forty gallery exhibitions, and co-edited twelve accompanying exhibition catalogues.

Patrice Forest

DOX, Exhibition David Lynch, Up in Flames 

Photo Tomáš Cindr © DOX

Patrice Forest – A close friend of David Lynch and director of the Item éditions lithographic studio in Paris. In 2007 Patrice Forest initiated David Lynch into the secrets of lithography during the time that Lynch was creating nearly three hundred works in the studio. Item éditions is the oldest lithographic studio in Paris, with presses used in the past by Picasso, Matisse, and Giacometti, to name just a few. The exhibition includes not only a large set of lithographs from Lynch’s production at Item éditions but also two photographic series of gelatin silver prints on Baryta paper titled Small Stories.

DOX Centre for Contemporary Art

Poupětova 1, Prague 7

www.dox.cz

David Lynch: Up in Flames

DOX Centre for Contemporary Art, Prague, 19 june - 8 February 2026

James Bidgood: Dreamlands @ CLAMP, New York + 2025 Monograph from Salzgeber + 1971 film "Pink Narcissus"

James Bidgood | Dreamlands 

CLAMP, New York

Through August 29, 2025

James Bidgood

“Richie Backstage, Sleeping Portrait,”

 mid-1960s/printed later

Digital C-print 

© Estate of James Bidgood

Courtesy of CLAMP, New York

James Bidgood, Dreamlands, Salzgeber, 2025

Book Cover Courtesy of Salzgeber

160 p., 24 × 32 cm - English / Deutsch

ISBN 978-3-95985-718-5

CLAMP presents “James Bidgood | Dreamlands,” an exhibition of photographs marking the launch of the monograph of the same title from Salzgeber, in addition to recent screenings of the artist’s cult classic film, “Pink Narcissus,” at theaters across the United States and Europe.

The book combines iconic motifs from the artist’s oeuvre with many previously unpublished images. The exhibition at CLAMP includes twelve of these new photographs selected from the estate archives, along with a large-scale print of “Pan”—the monograph’s cover image.

“Pink Narcissus,” James Bidgood’s film from 1971, described as a “kaleidoscopic fever dream of queer desire,” was recently restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive, and has been playing at theaters since late 2024, including MoMA (New York), Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), BAM (New York), Metrograph (New York), and other screens in London, Bologna, San Francisco, Seattle, Provincetown, Tucson, St. Louis, etc.

James Bidgood passed away in 2022 at the age of 88. A New Yorker for over 70 years, he was adored and admired by generations of artists and cinephiles alike.

When James Bidgood first came to New York from Wisconsin in the 1950s, he worked as a drag performer and occasional set and costume designer at Club 82 in the East Village. After studying at Parsons School of Design from 1957 to 1960, James Bidgood found jobs as a window dresser and costume designer.

He then went on to work as a photographer for men’s physique publications and began creating his own personal photographs and films that greatly benefited from his talents in theater design and costume construction. It was during this period in the early 1960s that James Bidgood began working on his masterpiece—the 8mm opus “Pink Narcissus.”

In his tiny apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, he handcrafted sets using humble materials to create a theatrical dreamland in which artifice became transcendent. With hand-tailored clothing, saturated lighting, and lots of glitter, James Bidgood built a cosmos of queer belonging, populated with angelic figures of male beauty—including Cupid, Pan, and other mythological gods, along with harlequins, soldiers, firemen, hustlers, drag queens, altar boys, and more.

Bidgood’s confined domestic production speaks to both necessity and liberation—”a queer creative spirit refusing to be constrained by material limitations.” In fact, the artist and his models would eat, sleep, and frolic within the sets until it was time to tear them down and begin building the next scene.

Within this space, and in front of his lens, the homosexuals that were ostracized by larger society could be beautiful, glamorous, complex, silly, or simply themselves.

CLAMP 

247 West 29th Street, New York, NY 10001

clampart.com

James Bidgood | Dreamlands

CLAMP, New York, July 10 – August 29, 2025

Maurizio Galimberti: Polaroid Mosaics Exhibition @ Venice, Le Stanze della Fotografia / The Rooms of Photography, Venice

Maurizio Galimberti 

tra Polaroid/Ready Made e le Lezioni Americane di Italo Calvino 

on Polaroid/Ready Made and Italo Calvino's American Lessons

Le Stanze della Fotografia / 

The Rooms of Photography, Venice 

Through 10 August 2025

MAURIZIO GALIMBERTI

Charlotte Gainsburg 

Polaroid plate, 50 x 50 cm, 2003 

By Maurizio Galimberti/Photomovie

MAURIZIO GALIMBERTI

Isabella Rossellini 

Polaroid plate, 2003, 50 x 60 cm 

By Maurizio Galimberti/ Photomovie

MAURIZIO GALIMBERTI

Johnny Depp 

Polaroid plate, 2015, 50 x 60 cm 

By Maurizio Galimberti/Photomovie

Le Stanze della Fotografia / The Rooms of Photography presents the exhibition Maurizio Galimberti tra Polaroid/Ready Made e le Lezioni Americane di Italo Calvino [Maurizio Galimberti on Polaroid/Ready Made and Italo Calvino's American Lessons], curated by Denis Curti, organised by Marsilio Arte and Fondazione Giorgio Cini.

Internationally known for his portraits of celebrities like Lady Gaga, Robert De Niro, Johnny Depp and Umberto Eco, and for having published books and staged site-specific exhibitions on New York, Paris, Milan, Rome and Venice, Maurizio Galimberti presents some of his most iconic Polaroid mosaics in Venice – including Johnny Depp, Barbara Bouchet and Angelica Huston – alongside more recent works, some of them previously unseen, such as those dedicated to Taylor Swift.

Maurizio Galimberti (Como, 1956) in 1983 began to use the Polaroid camera almost exclusively, appreciating it for the immediacy of its results and the possibility of “manipulation”. With it he creates photographic mosaics, the artistic form for which he is best known. His expressive language mixes a sensitivity to the contemporary image with influences derived from the historical avant-gardes - Futurism and Cubism for shapes and spirit, Surrealism and Dadaism for modes.

As Denis Curti observes, «his works do not set out to reproduce reality faithfully, but are the product of an investigation of the visible, an operation of breaking down the world that finds its ideal instrument in photography. Galimberti takes inspiration from David Hockney’s photographic collages and is guided in his research by such illustrious models as the Futurist works of Umberto Boccioni or Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, inspired in turn by Etienne-Jules Marey breakdown of movement» (D. Curti, Capire la fotografia contemporanea, Marsilio 2020).

MAURIZIO GALIMBERTI

Messico (4)

Polaroid plate, 2002, 40 x 50cm 

By Maurizio Galimberti/Archivio M.G. - N.308

MAURIZIO GALIMBERTI

New York Studio n. 10 

Polaroid plate, 2024, 31 x 66 cm 

By Maurizio Galimberti/Angelos Dimitriou

MAURIZIO GALIMBERTI

Taylor Swift (1) 

Polaroid plate, 2024, 50 x 54 cm

By Maurizio Galimberti/Luchi Collection

The exhibition is divided into six sections: Cenacolo, History, Sport, Portraits, Taylor Swift and Places, each of which presents a different facet of his work and his approach to photography. His creations, characterised by a multifaceted and fragmented vision of reality, are taken apart and put back together as in a mosaic, offering a profound reflection on perception and on the multiplicity of viewpoints.

The images are almost always manipulated at the development stage, exerting pressure with simple tools – like pens and wooden sticks – directly onto the surface of the support, or assembled into mosaic-like compositions, in which each photograph contributes to the formation of an end result able to create a spectacular overall vision.

«His technical inventions, manipulations, ready-mades and mosaics – Denis Curti still observes – are none other than the metaphor for a transversal language that does not pass through the filter of rationality, and, precisely for this reason, becomes emotion. In every one of his photos there is a precise gesturality, a visual act that finds its synthesis inside the definition of «Instant Artist», invented by Maurizio himself to describe his production, because, when he decided to transform his youthful passion into a profession, he chose the Instamatic camera as his ideal instrument. In his hands, this medium goes beyond the purely descriptive detail, through a procedure that is calculated and always oriented towards the transfiguration of the visible».

Le Stanze della Fotografia 

The Rooms of Photography

Venice, Island of San Giorgio Maggiore

www.lestanzedellafotografia.it

Maurizio Galimberti tra Polaroid/Ready Made e le Lezioni Americane di Italo Calvino

Maurizio Galimberti on Polaroid/Ready Made and Italo Calvino's American Lessons

Le Stanze della Fotografia / The Rooms of Photography, Venice, 10 April – 10 August 2025

Paolo Roversi @ Pace Gallery, NYC - "Along the Way" Focused Retrospective Exhibition (early 1990s - present)

Paolo Roversi: Along the Way

Pace Gallery, New York 

September 12 – October 25, 2025

Paolo Roversi 

Natalia, Paris, 2003

© Paolo Roversi, courtesy Pace Gallery

Pace presents an exhibition of work by photographer PAOLO ROVERSI at its 508 West 25th Street gallery in New York. Opening on September 12, during New York Fashion Week, and running through October 25, this focused retrospective will feature works produced by Paolo Roversi between the early 1990s and the present, highlighting the artist’s relationships with his many collaborators in the fashion industry.

Roversi’s upcoming exhibition with Pace in New York—his first solo show with the gallery since 2019—will present an overview of his storied career through a selection of photographs created over the past 35 years.“Every portrait is a meeting, an exchange, a mutual intimate confession,” Paolo Roversi has said of his work. The show will shed light on Roversi’s legacy as the artist behind some of the most iconic fashion images of our time.

Drawing inspiration from the work of August Sander, Robert Frank, and Diane Arbus, Paolo Roversi developed a distinctive style that is deeply influenced by the Byzantine architecture and rich cultural history of his birthplace, Ravenna, Italy. “Paolo's photography is timeless,” Sylvie Lécallier, curator Roversi’s 2024 exhibition at the Palais Galliera in Paris, said in an interview last year. “It is detached from the spirit of the times, from the ephemeral trends of fashion. It is located both at the heart of fashion and at the edge.”

Made with Polaroid film and mostly taken in his Parisian studio, Roversi's dreamlike, enigmatic images are imbued with a classical sensibility. His studio, he has said, “is a place for the chance, the dream, the imaginary to prevail. I give these forces as much space as I can.”

In addition to his collaborators in the fashion world, Polo Roversi has recently joined forces with his friend and fellow artist Sheila Hicks. For these works, which will figure in Pace’s exhibition, no discussion is had between the two artists regarding a direction for the final work, each knowing and respecting the other’s practice.

Born in Ravenna, Italy in 1947, Paolo Roversi discovered his passion for photography during a 1964 family holiday in Spain— upon his return from the trip, he built a darkroom in the basement of his home. He began his career in 1970, taking photojournalism assignments from the Associated Press. In 1973, at the invitation of photographer and ELLE art director Peter Knapp, Paolo Roversi moved to Paris, where he has lived and worked ever since. After a nine-month period assisting British photographer Lawrence Sackmann, whom he cites as an influential teacher, Paolo Roversi started shooting independently with small commissions for ELLE and the band Depeche Mode, gaining wider recognition with a Dior beauty campaign in 1980 and ultimately forging his reputation as one of the industry's leading photographers by the mid- 1980s. As model Guinevere van Seenus, who has worked with Roversi for nearly three decades, has said, “Having your portrait taken is more than just looking at the camera, [Paolo] creates the space for the person to [emerge]."

Today, Paolo Roversi’s work can be found in museum collections around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Getty Museum in Los Angeles; and the National Portrait Gallery in London. He has had major exhibitions around the world—in recent years, at the Museo d'Arte della città di Ravenna, Palazzo Reale in Milan, the Palais Galliera in Paris, the Multimedia Art Museum in Moscow, and Dallas Contemporary in Texas—and has published numerous books, including Paolo Roversi: Palais Galliera (2024), Lettres sur la lumière, with philosopher Emanuele Coccia (Gallimard, 2024), Des Oiseaux (Éditions Xavier Barral, 2023), Paolo Roversi – Studio Luce (Museo d'Arte della città di Ravenna, 2020), Natalia (Stromboli, 2018), and Nudi (Stromboli, 1999).

PACE NEW YORK

508 West 25th Street, New York City

www.pacegallery.com

Trevor Paglen @ Pace Gallery, NYC - "Cardinals" Exhibition

Trevor Paglen: Cardinals

Pace Gallery, New York

June 26 - August 15, 2025

Trevor Paglen 

Near Lichau Creek (undated), n.d. 

© Trevor Paglen, courtesy Pace Gallery

Pace presents an exhibition of work by TREVOR PAGLEN at its 540 West 25th Street gallery in New York. This focused presentation features photographs of novel aerial phenomena captured by the artist in the American West over the last two decades. Bringing together a selection of prints and polaroids, this show will explore the relationships between UFO (Unidentified Flying Object) sightings, Artificial Intelligence, and the rise of disinformation in today’s media environment—which has all but obliterated the notion of ‘truth.’ As Trevor Paglen has said, we live in “a historical moment wherein our relationships to text, images, information, and media are being entirely upended,” and UFOs, deployed by the US military and intelligence agencies as psychological instruments since the 1950s, “blur lines between perception, imagination, and 'objective' reality, whatever that may or may not be.”

The artist, whose rigorous practice spans photography, sculpture, video, and installation, is known for his investigations of invisible phenomena and forces, including technological, scientific, socio-political, and historical subjects. Through his work, Trevor Paglen has explored Artificial Intelligence, surveillance, data collection, and militarism in America, meditating on the ways these issues influence modes of perceiving and relating to the natural world—from the landscapes of the US to the cosmological realms beyond the Earth.

“UFOs live in the latent space between the material, the sensible, and the perceptual,” Trevor Paglen said of his enduring interest in the history of UFO photography. “They inhabit the crossroads of fear, desire, logic, and hope. They produce communities of believers and debunkers, and dreams of divine salvation, endless energy, impossible physics, dark conspiracies, and existential fears.”

The otherworldly, entirely undoctored photographs on view at Pace in New York this summer depict diminutive UFOs amid sprawling landscapes near US military test sites and training bases in California and Utah, including one near Robert Smithson’s seminal land artwork Spiral Jetty. Trevor Paglen has been capturing his UFO images since 2002, often while carrying out research and site visits for other projects. Exploiting the hyper memetic qualities of the UFO, he insists on the mysteries of his images by withholding information about what exactly he has captured—in some cases, the contents of these photographs are unknown to the artist as well.

He produced these photographs with various cameras: a Phillips Compact II 8x10, a Wista 4x5 field camera, a Pentax medium-format handheld, a Canon 35mm, and two digital medium-format cameras, one modified to shoot infrared. Most of the works in this series were shot on analog Kodak Portra, T-Max, or Fuji FP Instant film.

Paglen’s UFO photographs can be understood in conversation with his body of images of “unids,” or “unidentifieds”—the many hundreds of unknown objects in orbit around the Earth that are monitored and tracked by the US military—which he captured using infrared telescopes in remote locations. Atmospheric and mysterious, these skyscapes, which figured in Paglen’s 2023 solo show with Pace in New York, show the light trails of “unids,” drawing out the abstracted, textural qualities of the cosmos.

Concurrent with his exhibition of UFO photographs at Pace, Trevor Paglen is presenting work in the group exhibition "The World Through AI", on view at the Jeu de Paume in Paris through September 21, 2025.

TREVOR PAGLEN (b. 1974, Camp Springs, Maryland) is known for investigating the invisible through the visible, with a wide-reaching approach that spans image making, sculpture, investigative journalism, writing, engineering, and numerous other disciplines.

The clandestine and the hidden are revealed in series such as The Black Sites, The Other Night Sky, and Limit Telephotography in which the limits of vision are explored through the histories of landscape photography, abstraction, Romanticism, and technology. Paglen’s investigation into the epistemology of representation can be seen in his Symbology and Code Names series which utilize text, video, object, and image to explore questions surrounding military culture and language. Among his chief concerns are learning how to see the historical moment we live in and developing the means to imagine alternative futures.

Trevor Paglen has had numerous one-person exhibitions, including at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (2019); Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt (2015); Eli & Edythe Broad Art Museum, Michigan State University, East Lansing (2015); Protocinema Istanbul (2013); Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands (2013); and Vienna Secession (2010). He has participated in group exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2008, 2010, 2018); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2014); The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2012); Tate Modern, London (2010), and numerous other institutions.

PACE NEW YORK

540 West 25th Street, New York City

www.pacegallery.com

Cindy Sherman. The Women @ Hauser & Wirth Menorca

Cindy Sherman. The Women

Hauser & Wirth Menorca

23 June – 26 October 2025

Cindy Sherman

Untitled #566

2016

Dye sublimation metal print

121.9 x 128.3 cm / 48 x 50 1/2 in

© Cindy Sherman

Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Cindy Sherman

Untitled Film Still #6

1977

Gelatin silver print

25.4 x 20.3 cm / 10 x 8 in

© Cindy Sherman

Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Cindy Sherman is globally renowned for her exploration of identity and gender through the performance of meticulously observed personas for the camera. For her first solo exhibition in Spain in over two decades, ‘Cindy Sherman. The Women’ features a selection of the artist’s most iconic bodies of work, dating from the 1970s to 2010s, emphasising how Sherman revolutionized the role of the camera in artistic practice.

The exhibition includes the groundbreaking Untitled Films Stills (1977 – 1980), through which Sherman came to widespread attention as one of the ‘Pictures Generation’ artists who gained prominence in the 1970s and ‘80s responding to the age of mass media and celebrity. This pivotal series will be juxtaposed with Sherman’s large-format portrayals of film stars, starlets, society women and fashionistas from various series made over subsequent decades, addressing the layered presentation and public perception of femininity.  One of the central galleries will be dedicated to the Bus Riders and Murder Mystery series, and other early works that pre-date the Film Stills, not publicly displayed until 2000, illustrating Sherman’s detailed observations of American society and the starting point for themes and methods that were to develop throughout her career. The range of works on view offer a rare presentation of Sherman’s enduring concern with the interaction between female roles and images, and the gaze(s) to which women are relentlessly subjected. Through her work she points to the way women exist in society as an image of themselves.

‘Cindy Sherman. The Women’ takes its title from the 1936 all-female hit play by Clare Boothe Luce, a merciless ensemble piece about women’s interactions with women, of their own and different classes, and of different appearances. Twice made into feature films (1939 and 2008), it is exemplary of the genre of classical Hollywood ‘women’s film’ around which feminist film theory was formed. Moreover, not only the characters in her play but Boothe Luce herself is representative of the multifarious kinds of femininities explored by Cindy Sherman. As the 20th-century cult of fame and celebrity has transitioned into the 21st-century context of influencers and social media stars, Sherman’s deconstructions of gender, wealth and privilege remain of acute relevance. Sherman’s work reveals to us the degree to which we all construct and perform our identities; each iteration of her performance is a new and unique character. Through these images she has become the leading exponent of the subgenre which combines performance with photography, drawing our attention to the fact that identity is complex, constructed and performed.

The layers of media are important in this picture of complexity; the role of film, fashion, magazines and classical portrait photography is part of the subject matter. In the Ominous Landscape images from 2010, elaborately dressed female figures stand against vast and inhospitable landscapes. The figures seem eerily displaced, digitally superimposed on island landscapes shot on Capri, Stromboli, Iceland and Shelter Island, New York; now they are shown on an island within an island, Illa del Rei in Menorca. This series of photographs evolved from an editorial project for Pop magazine, featuring clothes and accessories chosen by Cindy Sherman from the Chanel archives. The garments range from 1920s haute couture designed by Coco Chanel herself to contemporary creations by Karl Lagerfeld. The sumptuous costumes create a striking contrast with the bleak intensity of the surrounding landscapes, whilst the female figures loom larger than the surrounding natural world in a reversal of the Romantic hierarchy.

Cindy Sherman

Untitled #550

2010/2012

Chromogenic color print

153 x 302.3 cm / 60 1/4 x 119 in

© Cindy Sherman

Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

It was from this project that the Flappers series developed from 2016 to 2018, focusing on the young women who challenged social norms and fashions in the 1920s as a form of empowerment, emancipation and radical modernity, some emulating Hollywood stars, who pose in glamorous attire with heavy and stylised makeup. The series also addresses aging; however, the protagonists are shown decades from their heyday seemingly unaware they are past their prime. Nevertheless, Sherman’s depictions seem more nuanced and sympathetic than the harsh image of Norma Desmond, the archetypal deluded silent-era actress in Sunset Boulevard. 

Cindy Sherman had previously worked on series addressing women of social standing and the aging process, works from which feature in the exhibition. These include one of the exceptionally grandiose Society Portraits from 2008, in which Cindy Sherman introduced ornate frames and experimented with a green screen to create fantasy environments for women of the upper echelons of society. Such backdrops heighten the isolation of the characters Cindy Sherman portrays and focus attention on the heavily made-up women absorbed by their wealth and status. She later adopted the personas of socialites and fashionistas in a commission for Harper’s Bazaar in 2016, making a series of images of women in designer clothes and accessories, within various landscape settings. In these works, she experimented with multiple exposures to duplicate the women depicted, suggesting a fractured and unstable sense of identity.

A selection of the iconic Untitled Film Stills sits at the centre of the exhibition, a series of black-and-white photographs originally conceived as a group of imaginary film stills from a single actress’s career. Inspired by 1950s and ‘60s Hollywood, film noir, B movies and European art-house films, Sherman’s plethora of invented characters and scenarios imitated the style of production shots used by movie studios to publicize their films. The images are evocative of certain character types and genres, but always intentionally ambiguous, leaving room for the viewer to imagine their own narratives, and even insert themselves into the work.

Pre-dating the Film Stills, are works from Sherman’s Bus Riders and Murder Mystery series, both created in 1976, and a selection of the Line Up images, made in 1977, all while she was still a student at Buffalo State College in upstate New York. Highlighting the foundations of Sherman’s conceptual thinking, the ‘Bus Riders’ embody a range of cultural stereotypes and everyday personalities across American society, harnessing poses, clothes and facial expressions that bring familiar characters to life. In contrast, the ‘Murder Mystery’ and ‘Line Up’ series have a decided staginess and overt theatricality, and even a deliberate melodrama, to the characters and poses. In some, the act of photographing is made visible through the capturing of the cable-release and the marks on the studio floor; here, Sherman is pointing to her medium and exposing her process as part of the act of creation. In these very early series Sherman was working through the process of adopting different personas and merging the role of photographer, model and storyteller. 

Throughout her career, Sherman’s relentless focus on the diversity of womanhood emphasises the play of difference rather than sameness within gender categories, making the idea of womanhood expansive rather than restrictive.

Cindy Sherman

Untitled Film Still #24

1978

Gelatin silver print

20.3 x 25.4 cm / 8 x 10 in

© Cindy Sherman

Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Cindy Sherman

Untitled (the actress at the murder scene)

1976/2000

Gelatin silver print

25.4 x 20.3 cm / 10 x 8 in

© Cindy Sherman

Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

ARTIST CINDY SHERMAN

Born in 1954 in Glen Ridge NJ, Cindy Sherman lives and works in New York NY. Her groundbreaking work has interrogated themes around representation and identity in contemporary media for over four decades. Coming to prominence in the late 1970s with the Pictures Generation group—alongside artists such as Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince and Louise Lawler—Sherman first turned her attention to photography at Buffalo State College where she studied art in the early 1970s. Utilising prosthetics, theatrical effects, photographic techniques and digital technologies, she has channelled and reconstructed familiar personas known to the collective psyche, often in unsettling ways, and has explored the more grotesque aspects of humanity through the lens of horror and the abject.

Recent solo exhibitions include FOMU Fotomuseum Antwerp, ‘Cindy Sherman. Anti-Fashion’, Antwerp, Belgium (2024); Museum of Cycladic Art, ‘Cindy Sherman at Cycladic: Early Works’, Athens, Greece (2024); Photo Elysée, ‘Cindy Sherman’, Lausanne, Switzerland (2024); Espace Louis Vuitton Seoul, ‘Cindy Sherman. On Stage – Part II’, Seoul, Korea (2024); The Serralves Foundation, ‘Cindy Sherman. Metamorphosis’, Porto, Portugal (2022); National Portrait Gallery, ‘Cindy Sherman’, London, UK (2010), Fondation Louis Vuitton, ‘Cindy Sherman’, Paris, France (2010).

Also on view at Hauser & Wirth Menorca:

Mika Rottenberg. Vibrant Matter

Through 26 October 2025

HAUSER & WIRTH MENORCA

Illa del Rei, Mahon, Menorca, Balearic Islands, Spain

www.hauserwirth.com