Cindy Sherman, Untitled #133, 1984, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart © Cindy Sherman
Cindy Sherman: Anti-Fashion
Apr 21 – Sep 10, 2023
Staatsgalerie Stuttgart
Stuttgart, Germany

For almost 50 years, the subject of fashion has been a constant in the work of US artist Cindy Sherman. The exhibition Anti-Fashion focuses on this close engagement with fashion and approaches her photographic oeuvre from a new perspective. In doing so, it sheds light on the interplay between art and fashion for Sherman uses her numerous commissions from magazines such as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar as well as her close collaborations with renowned designers as a constant source of inspiration. Until today the artist continues to influence the aesthetics of the fashion world, creating essential impulses and inspiring a whole generation of photographers. Through the medium of photography, fashion and fine art have always been in dialogue – but Cindy Sherman goes further; she interrogates the system that supports fashion, its glossy surface and its dark underbelly.

Her interest in the fashion world is marked by a subversive attitude towards all that it stands for. Thus, her photographs show characters that are anything but desirable and run counter to the conventions of haute couture and the prevalent notions of beauty. Last, but by no means least, the exhibition reveals the subject of fashion as the starting point for the artist’s critical investigation of gender, stereotypes, and age. The wide range of Sherman’s characters highlights the artificiality and changeability of identity, which – now more than ever – is shown to be selectable, (self-)constructed and fluid.

The exhibition is realized in cooperation with Cindy Sherman’s studio in New York and her gallery Hauser & Wirth and will be shown at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg / Falckenberg Collection and the FOMU – Fotomuseum Antwerp afterwards.

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