Cindy Sherman

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 centrefolds 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.

Exhibition catalogue: Cindy Sherman Co-publication Flammarion - Jeu de paume Texts by Jean-Pierre Criqui, Régis Durand, Laura Mulvey Publication date: 15 May 2006 288 pages: 250 illustrations; format: 240 x 280 cm

Exhibition venues/dates — Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria, 25 November 2006 - 14 January 2007 — Louisiana Museum for Moderne Kunst, Humlebaek, Denmark, 9 February - 13 May 2007 — Martin-Gropius-Bau Berlin, Germany, 13 June - 10 September 2007

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.

Cindy Sherman's work has featured in a great number of exhibitions around the world. Among the most important solo shows of recent years were: — 1997: Cindy Sherman: The Complete “Untitled Film Stills“ — MoMA, New York — 1999: CAPC de Bordeaux — 2001: Nikolaj Copenhagen Contemporary Art Center — 2003: Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, — 2004: Fashioning Fiction — In Photography since 1990, MoMA, New York

Curators: Régis Durand and Véronique Dabin

www.cindysherman.com

Pressetext

Cindy Sherman - Retrospective
Organisation: Jeu de Paume, Paris
Kuratoren: Regis Durand, Veronique Dabin

Stationen:
25.11.06 - 14.01.07 Kunsthaus Bregenz
09.02.06 - 13.05.06 Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek
13.06.07 - 10.09.07 Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin