The exhibition concept for Cindy Sherman – Anti-Fashion at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart from April 21 until September 10, 2023 was elaborated and realized by Alessandra Nappo (Staatsgalerie Stuttgart). The Stuttgart presentation is the first to be staged by the Karlsruhe-based design studios zwo/ elf + fronczek.
In the bilingual (English/German) exhibition catalogue (Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de) Foreword, Christiane Lange, art historian and director of the museum since 2013, writes that elements of every fashion movement, be it flower power or punk, no matter how subversive, were sooner or later taken up by the fashion industry and thus found their way into the clothes we all wear today. We may think that we dress in a unique style, expressing our individuality, whereas, as consumers, we are at the mercy of the fashion industry. Still according to Christiane Lange, artists, on the other hand, actively intervene in the world of fashion – they are not fashion victims, but the creators of counter-fashion.
The American artist Cindy Sherman (*1954 in Glen Ridge, New Jersey) has served as the sole model for her photographs since the very beginning of her career. Christiane Lange writes that the photographer, painstakingly made up and disguised, assumes the most diverse range of personas and has been using roleplay – either in individual portraits or in entire series – to expose stereotypes, to shine a light on the ambiguities of normative gender classifications, and to reveal our society’s problematic attitude to aging.
Christiane Lange underlines that the word “disguise” denotes the concealment of one’s identity by means of a change of “guise,” or clothing. The word hints at the power of clothing: different outfits allow us to adopt different roles. For Cindy Sherman, fashion is therefore the constant bassline that resonates through her entire oeuvre.
Christiane Lange underlines that the figures the artist assumes in her photographs are often dressed in haute couture – even in those series whose titles do not make us think of fashion, for example the Clowns or Landscapes. At the same time, Cindy Sherman is highly critical of the fashion industry and its dark side.
The fashion world is not deterred by criticism but, on the contrary, integrates and translates it into marketable trends, as for instance the “heroin chic” of the 1990s, notes Christiane Lange.
The museum director underlines that the collective perception of beauty has always been subject to change, and the visual arts have always played a role in shaping these fluctuations and revisions. Cindy Sherman is an outstanding example of this continuous interplay.
Christiane Lange remarks that, surprisingly, not a single exhibition devoted to Cindy Sherman’s work thus far has focused solely on fashion. Therefore, curator Alessandra Nappo’s exhibition concept fills a void.
The Staatsgalerie Stuttgart owns five works by Cindy Sherman, two of which are on show in Cindy Sherman – Anti-Fashion. In total, the exhibition presents 70 works, some of which have never been seen before, notably Cindy Sherman’s most recent series Men which, for the first time, can be admired in a museum setting, thanks to Galerie Sprüth Magers. The Stuttgart exhibition is complemented with film footage from the artist as well as short clips from fashion shows of the Japanese fashion label Undercover, founded by the designer Jun Takahashi.
In his catalogue essay, the curator Alessandro Nappo writes that fashion is ubiquitous and forms an integral part of the complex interplay between everyday life, consumer culture and art. Fascinated by this dynamic, Cindy Sherman has focused on fashion very early on, in the mid-1970s already, when she was still studying at Buffalo State College in New York state, where she explored the various techniques of an art scene dominated by conceptualism.
Fashion images became the starting point for Cindy Sherman’s exploration of the way stereotypes and social codes are constructed and disseminated, and for her ongoing engagement with aspects of identity, aging, and gender. The artist has been her own model for almost half a century, staging herself in her fictionalized photographic portraits in more than 600 different roles, many of which show her in the guise of bizarre fashion victims.
Cindy Sherman has a subversive attitude towards the fashion industry. Her photographs are humorous and provocative, they are parodies of commercial fashion photography.
Alessandro Nappo writes that the exhibition Cindy Sherman – Anti-Fashion and the accompanying catalogue set out to offer a fresh perspective on the artist’s work. Opening with the early photographs from the 1970s (Doll Clothes, Cover Girls), moving on to the provocative fashion series of the 1980s and 1990s and the follow-up projects (Clowns, Balenciaga, Landscapes, Harper’s Bazaar’s “Project Twirl”), to the most recent works (Men), the exhibition is the first to examine Cindy Sherman’s oeuvre through the prism of fashion.
According to Alessandro Nappo, Cindy Sherman finds inspiration in a wide range of visual source material: cinema, television, advertising, illustrated magazines, fairy tales, the Internet and social media. The common thread running through her body of work is fashion.
The curator stresses that, as a child, Cindy Sherman was given a pile of clothes from the 1920s by her grandmother. This gift would prove to be a defining moment in her life, as the garments allowed her to create countless alter-egos and to discover the power of transformation for her art.
When these metamorphoses became the focus of her photographic work, Cindy Sherman added to her repertoire of techniques other transformative strategies such as makeup, prosthetics, wigs and, since the early 2000s, editing software such as Photoshop. She used defacing, degendering, defamiliarization and deconstruction.
According to Alessandro Nappo, she presents fashion as a place of discipline and uniformity and at the same time as a “space of possibilities” that offers scope for alternative identities, lifestyles and forms of desire.
These are just a few take-aways from the bilingual (English/German) exhibition catalogue Cindy Sherman – Anti-Fashion, Sandstein Verlag, April 2023, 168 pages with 130 color illustrations, 24,5 x 24,5 cm, from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de.
The book contains a foreword by Christiane Lange and contributions by Alessandro Nappo, Hanne Loreck and Katharina Massing.
The exhibition Cindy Sherman – Anti-Fashion with an exhibition concept elaborated by Alessandra Nappo (Staatsgalerie Stuttgart) will be shown at:
– Staatsgalerie Stuttgart from April 21 until September 10, 2023
– Deichtorhallen Hamburg / Sammlung Falckenberg from October 7, 2023 until January 28, 2024
– FOMU Fotomuseum Antwerpen from September 27, 2024 until February 2, 2025
Further reading: 2021 review of the Close-Up exhibition at Fondation Beyeler.
Beauty and Grooming products at Amazon USA
For a better reading, quotations and partial quotations in exhibition catalogue / book review of Cindy Sherman – Anti-Fashion have not been put between quotation marks.
Exhibition review / exhibition catalogue review added on June 2, 2023 at 20:15 German time.
