Cindy Sherman Retrospective at Kunsthaus Bregenz

Written by Chandra Strine Wednesday, 19 January 2011 23:33

Bregenz, Austria - Ever since her first works some thirty years ago, Cindy Sherman has herself been pretty much the sole model for her elaborately staged images.  In each series, she has used costumes, make-up, props and even prostheses to turn herself into the personas that she photographs in the studio.  The result is a major body of work, and one of the first in the field of contemporary visual art, along with Jeff Wall’s, to be wholly photographic.

Funny, grating, sometimes brutal, the figures in this gallery of figures explore cultural and social stereotypes and their representation in the media, from magazine centerfolds to advertisements, films and classical painting.  What emerges through these images is a subtle analysis of individual identity, both the fantasies that it generates and the forces that shape it.  This immersion in the uncertain, conflictual zones where individual identity struggles with the collective imaginary, stereotypes and issues of symbolic power, can be either playful or – when it touches on horror and repulsion, on the decay and dismembering of the body – very dark.

This retrospective, featuring work from 1975 to 2005, shows the development and richly inventive quality of Sherman’s art and gives a sense of its structuring themes and the very pertinent questions that it raises.

The retrospective presented at the Kunsthaus Bregenz features over 250 works, most of them from the artist’s most famous series. On exhibition December 2, 2006 thru January 28, 2007.

Biographical note

Cindy Sherman was born in 1954 in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, not far from New York City.  She studied painting, and then photography at Buffalo.  There she met the artist Robert Longo, who was to be of decisive importance in her life. Together with a student friend, Charles Clough, they created Hallwalls, an independent space where she exhibited alongside other up-and-coming artists.  After graduating in 1976, she settled in New York.  She started photographing herself in 1977, and the use of her own image became a founding principle of her work. Cindy Sherman lives and works in New York.

Clowns
The somewhat tardy appearance of the clown in Cindy Sherman's work was, clearly, inevitable.  Sherman's taste for masquerades and dressing up, the mixture of the grotesque and the serious, her mildly hysterical chameleonic, all combine to conjure the essence of clowns and clowning.  The clown figures are the quintessential expression of the carnivalesque quality of Cindy Sherman's work, with its attendant load of contradictions and excess.

The disturbing quality of the traditional clown's makeup is widely acknowledged—there is an inescapable hint of ambivalence, depression, even perversity, beneath the cheery mask.  Inevitably, too, clowns are associated with childhood, and the ambivalence of childhood.  Cindy Sherman's clowns step outside the boundaries of convention governing their traditional costumes and make-up.

Visit Kunsthaus Bregenz at: www.kunsthaus-bregenz.at/