CINDY SHERMAN
ANTI FASHION

With around 50 works spanning five decades, the exhibition ANTI-FASHION takes an in-depth look at the fascinating dialogue the artist maintains with the fashion world. Since the 1980s, Sherman has been drawing on a number of commercial commissions from renowned fashion houses and designers such as Chanel and Stella ­McCartney as well as international fashion magazines such as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar as a constant source of inspiration. By the same token, the artist influences and stimulates the aesthetics of the fashion world and continues to inspire an entire generation of photographers.

Sherman’s provocative photographs do not convey the glamour, sex appeal, or elegance that we commonly associate with fashion. Instead, they show characters that are anything but desirable and run counter to the fashion world ideals of flawlessness. Last, but by no means least, the exhibition reveals the subject of fashion as the starting point for the artist’s critical examination of aspects of identity, sex, gender, and age. Sherman’s myriad characters demonstrate the artificiality and mutability of identity, which appears – now more than ever – to be selectable, (self-)constructed, and fluid.

With national and international loans as well as exclusively selected material from the artist’s New York archive, the exhibition is the first to be devoted to the subject of fashion in Sherman’s work.

The show is accompanied by a selection of photographic and artistic positions from the Falckenberg Collection. From the collection, works by the following artists are shown:

Vito Acconci, John Baldessari, Aidas Bareikis, Karla Black, John Bock, Monica Bonvicini, Olaf Breuning, Thorsten Brinkmann, Sophie Calle, Clegg & Guttman, Michael Ray Charles, Phil Collins, Walker Evans, Valie Export, Lynn Hershman-Leeson, Peter Hujar, Christian Jankowski, Astrid Klein, Barbara Kruger, Robert Longo, Urs Lüthi, Paul McCarthy, Dieter Meier, Marilyn Minter, Joyce Pensato, Richard Prince, Markus Schinwald, Cindy Sherman, Christopher Williams

The exhibition was curated by Dr. Alessandra Nappo, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart and realized by the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart in cooperation with Cindy Sherman’s studio in New York and her gallery Hauser & Wirth and will be shown at the FOMU – Fotomuseum Antwerp afterwards.

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