Self-portrait of the artist as an ageing rich lady with brunette, apparently dyed hair, ostentatious jewellery and a bustier dress. The staircase of an old mansion can be seen in the background. Cindy Sherman, Sammlung Goetz Munich
Sammlung Goetz

Cindy Sherman

The staging of female role models is the central theme of Cindy Sherman’s work, in which the American artist explores stereotypes of the collective visual memory in a media-driven society.

With her photographs, Cindy Sherman has had a lasting influence on 20th century art. Much like an actress, she portrays herself in different roles before the camera. Although Sherman’s photographs are self-portraits in the traditional sense, they do not reveal much about the artist’s personality. Rather, her primary concern is the deconstruction of gender roles and stereotypes.

Sherman developed early in her childhood an obsession for disguise and masquerade, which she further pursued at the Art Academy in Buffalo. The artist became known with her black and white series, Untitled Film Stills (1977-1980), in which she embodied stereotypical female characters from fictional scenes of the 1950s. Later, she created large-format color photographs, which explored topics such as fashion photography, fairytale characters, horror scenes and society ladies. The Sammlung Goetz has extensive work groups from nearly all phases of Sherman’s artistic career. With approximately 60 works, the retrospective, which was designed in close collaboration with the artist, provides an excellent overview of her entire work.

Curated by Karsten Löckemann

Cindy Sherman

184 pages, 152 ill., hardcover
German/English
2015, Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern
ISBN 978-3-7757-3960-3
€ 19,99

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Upcoming

Cyrill Lachauer. The Sunset Route

| Kunstpalais Erlangen

feat. Mike Brodie, Mouse Green, Rhyw, Mia Justice Smith, Moritz Stumm

In the exhibition The Sunset Route, on view at the Kunstpalais Erlangen and created in collaboration with the Sammlung Goetz, Cyrill Lachauer presents works from 2020 to 2025, a period during which he traveled on freight trains through the USA, Mexico, and Bosnia. In the spirit of poetic ethnography, he created photographs and films that are now being shown together for the first time. They all explore questions of freedom, self-determination, and resistance, as well as colonization, exclusion, and exploitation.

 

Laurie Simmons. Dollhouse Photographs

| Deutsches Theatermuseum

The American artist Laurie Simmons is known for her photographs featuring tiny dolls representing stereotypical female roles in domestic interiors. Her series In and Around the House (1978/79) is exemplary for this set-up photography. The series is the centerpiece of the exhibition, with 56 black-and-white images showing a doll occupied with the mundane chores of a housewife in the cozy environment of a dollhouse. The exhibition “Laurie Simmons: Dollhouse Photographs”, a collaboration of Sammlung Goetz, Deutsches Theatermuseum and FILMFEST MÜNCHEN, presents a selection of works by Simmons that cast a critical gaze at gender stereotypes in the American middle class.

Sterling Ruby

| Sammlung Goetz /Schaufenster

Los Angeles-based American artist Sterling Ruby is known for his cross-genre work, which ranges from ceramics and bronzes, collages and textiles, to enormous, spray-painted paintings. In his works, Ruby weaves together a variety of different autobiographical, art-historical, and sociological sources. Through deconstruction and reconstruction, he probes the idea of a non-hierarchical and borderless universe. The exhibition at the Sammlung Goetz /Schaufenster provides insight into his multi-layered artistic practice.

 

Jeff Wall

| Sammlung Goetz /Schaufenster

Canadian artist Jeff Wall is one of the most influential photographers of our time. In his elaborately staged pictorial compositions, he combines the narrative of cinema with painting. Wall became known for his large-format lightbox images, which are formally more reminiscent of the world of advertising than that of fine art. With this technique, he revolutionized the medium of photography, elevating it to the height of painting and sculpture. The exhibition at the Sammlung Goetz /Schaufenster presents a selection of his iconic lightbox images from the 1990s.

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