Cindy Sherman
Clowns
January 20–February 26, 2005
Munich

Sherman’s career spans a thirty-year period; within which she has addressed ideas of the abject, female stereotyping and the mediated image. Throughout this time she has maintained a truly seminal position within contemporary art.

This rise and continued success began in the late seventies, with the critically celebrated series Untitled Film Stills. It was within this series that Sherman would use her own body to play the role of the object.

Placing herself within the frame, Sherman acts not as the subject, in the traditional genre of portraiture but as an object that inverts the act of looking. Sherman’s own physicality is integral to the resultant image whilst her personality disappears from view and her true identity becomes irrelevant.

In the clown series, Sherman takes the notion of the mask and the masquerade in a new direction. Initially conceived after being approached by British Vogue magazine to guest edit their fashion section in June 2003, Sherman’s clown portraits would become a way of exploring the boundaries between clothing and costumery. Intrigued by the apparent dichotomy of the clowns’ persona and any sense of the interior, or real self, Sherman explores the society of difference in this subtly disparate group of facades.