On the heels of iconic photographer Cindy Sherman’s latest solo show at Metro Pictures, the gallery recently hung three enormous tapestries by the artist in its back gallery. Based on portraits created using filters and face-altering apps and posted to Instagram, the images don’t have the resolution to be printed large-scale but work wonderfully as tapestries, in which pixels translate to thread. More profoundly distorted and infinitely creepier than Sherman’s printed photos, the tapestries dramatically move Sherman’s vision from screen to wall. (On view at Chelsea’s Metro Pictures Gallery. Masks and social distancing are required.)
Cindy Sherman, installation view of three tapestries at Metro Pictures Gallery, Nov 2020.
It’s not hard to slip from male to female in Cindy Sherman’s reckoning. A bit of makeup and a change of clothing, and the iconic photographer became both halves of jet-set couples who are the subjects of her latest body of work at Metro Pictures Gallery in Chelsea. With exceptions, Sherman has shied away from portraying male figures in the past; her current characters embrace gender fluidity in colorful or opulent clothing from Stella McCartney’s archive. Placing them against backgrounds that Sherman shot in Bavaria, Shanghai and, here, Sissinghurst Castle Garden in England, the artist tempts viewers to read the identities of these eccentric characters. (On view through Oct 31st. Masks and social distancing are required.)
Cindy Sherman, Untitled, dye sublimation print, 62 ½ x 91 ¼ inches (image, no frame), ed of 6, 1 AP, 2019.
Press images of 1920s movie stars inspired Cindy Sherman’s latest body of work – photos of women who have aged out of the young starlet role but who still wear cupid lips, smoky eye shadow and wistful expressions. (At Metro Pictures in Chelsea through June 11th).
Cindy Sherman, Untitled, dye sublimation metal print, 70 ½ x 48 inches, 2016.
As the reviews come out, Cindy Sherman’s retrospective at MoMA (open Feb 26 – June 11) seems set to break ‘best-loved show’ records. Universal critical adoration usually arouses suspicion of cliquish agreeability. But Sherman takes the very notion of conformity to fashion and self-presentation -negotiated through society’s expectations – as her subject matter. Absurdity and grotesquery appear at every turn in this show, making Sherman an uber-critic whose acuity forces the following homages from New York’s major cultural commentators:
Though Smith takes umbrage with the show’s selection and non-chronological arrangement, calling it “magnificent if somewhat flawed,” Sherman herself is “…an increasingly vehement avenging angel waging a kind of war with the camera, using it to expose what might be called both the tyranny and the inner lives of images, especially the images of women that bombard and shape all of us at every turn.”
Saltz also gives Sherman fighting cred, calling her “…a warrior artist – one who has won her battles so decisively that I can’t imagine anyone ever again embarking on a lifetime of self-portraiture without coming up against her.” He adds, “I think of Cindy Sherman as an artist who only gets better.”
Schjeldahl affords Sherman the highest praise, saying, “The mysteries are irreducible…they qualify Sherman, to my mind, as the strongest and finest American artist of her time.” Pointing out that delusion allows a disconnect between “inner feeling” and “outer attributes” he adds that, “…Sherman makes hard, scary truths sustainable as only great artists can.”
Halle calls the MoMA retrospective “…the best show I’ve seen there since the Gerhard Richter survey [in 2002], and probably the best exhibit I’ve seen anywhere in a while…The way I’d put it is that Sherman uses glamour and horror to send up and celebrate the feminine mystique, including her own. She quantifies and categorizes the notion of one’s appearance, which fashion also does. But unlike Anna Wintour, Sherman isn’t in the business of marketing the cultural; she’s in the business of laying it bare.”
The biggest surprise in Cindy Sherman’s major career retrospective, opening to previews today (and officially on Feb 26th) at the Museum of Modern Art, is that there are few surprises. It testifies to Sherman’s stature and influence that so much of the work in the show – 171 photos from the 1977-80 Untitled Film stills to the most recent send-ups of society matrons – is so familiar that it’s hard to even find the critical distance to reconsider it.
What does emerge is Sherman’s consistent and merciless pillorying of character types from the fashion victim to the aging coquette in galleries arranged by series – history portraits, centerfolds, etc – or by theme – fashion, carnival, abjection. By comparison, the Untitled Film Stills (appearing in their entirety) appear kind by virtue of their hidden fakery and purposefully glamorized subjects.
Grotesquery – not limited to the fairy tale or sex series – is a heavy component of most of the work, whether in the repellent muscles of a prosthetic cleavage or the big hair and garish makeup of a woman trying desperately to hang on to her looks. Sherman’s caricatures let most of us off the hook – at least until we start wearing caftans to lounge around our loggias – by representing ‘other people’ who’ve lost their style compass.
Sherman’s early work – seen at the beginning and end of the show – belies such distancing, specifically a stop motion animated short film depicting Sherman as a paper doll who selects her own outfit only to be returned to her case by a giant hand. The artist’s ‘hand of God’ is now aided by Photoshop, as she alters facial details like those on an 18 foot high mural at the gallery entrance. But though technology lends Sherman the potential for serious distortion, she holds back, continuing to tweek the conventions of dress and representation to which we adhere to a greater or lesser degree.
