As a new exhibition dedicated to Cindy Sherman’s fashion imagery opens in Antwerp, curator Rein Deslé reveals the stories behind five of her key works
A portrait of the artist as a clown – initially produced for British Vogue in 2003 and since repurposed by FOMU to dress the exterior of the Antwerp museum – announces Cindy Sherman’s first major solo exhibition in Belgium. On the first floor, powder-pink walls are lined with several early series by the acclaimed American artist, as a TV set plays Doll Clothes on a loop. Made between 1975 and 1980, the works here offer not only a physical introduction to the two-parter exhibition but read as a moment of inception, highlighting the genesis of Sherman’s preoccupation with characterisation.
Anti-Fashion examines Sherman’s singular participation in the fashion industry. In addition to clowns, Sherman becomes a credible street-style personality (for Harper’s Bazaar, 2016) and explores masculinity (for Stella McCartney, 2019-20), elsewhere appropriating magazine covers for Cover Girls. Mirrors separate the rooms, employed as a reference to Sherman’s solo practice. “Working in her studio she’s alone – she’s her own designer, hairdresser, photographer and model – so the mirror is her main instrument,” explains curator Rein Deslé. “Also, as a design element, [it means] you can see dialogues between works that are really beautiful.”
These new shows (Early Works and Anti-Fashion) arrive in tandem with three further exhibitions across the city, celebrating the late Belgian artist James Ensor, whose work in the early 20th century explored similar territory to Sherman’s. “Both critique their contemporary society, looking at social conventions and seeing what’s strange, giving that back to the viewer,” says Deslé, relaying the pair’s shared hallmarks. “They’ve both gone against the grain and have this confrontational style of showing ugliness, trying to provoke. Cindy’s work is not about Cindy Sherman. It’s about how we construct identity, by wanting to conform or not wanting to conform. This is what she’s showing us in a very direct way, by presenting a mirror.”
Below, Rein Deslé discusses five seminal Cindy Sherman works in the show.
Untitled (Line-up), 1977/2011
“This series was made at the end of Sherman’s study time in Buffalo, right before she left for New York. She created these figures who are, after the play, coming before the curtain to say goodbye. She’s playing with this transition, from a nice girl to something very mysterious – she’s putting on the mask in this particular image, for example, playing with all these associations that we have with these clothes. It feels like an experiment, she’s playing a dress-up game, transforming herself into all these figures – the Zorro figure, the nice girl, and then the naughty girl.”
Untitled Film Still #17, 1978
“In New York, Sherman made her most famous work, Film Stills. You can understand it as an encyclopedia of female stereotypes in cinema. That’s what she’s intuitively presenting here: the references from European art house cinema from the 50s and 60s, that’s where her visual language comes from. She’s creating a fictive film still, capturing a complete narrative and all the tensions that go with that into one image. It was really important for her to use a visual language that was accessible, just as cinema is an accessible medium, because she’s giving us all these stereotypes that are created by cinema (this will come back in her career with advertising and with Instagram).
“The idea of feminism is also important in this context, because of course in cinema we have this tradition of the male gaze, and she was creating this series at the moment of the second feminist wave. So she’s clearly tapping into that, using the camera, traditionally a male instrument, as a woman looking at another woman, but then this woman being herself. All these dynamics are very important.”
Untitled #122, 1983
“This was her first commission from the fashion world, for Dianne Benson, who had a couple of boutiques in New York and asked Cindy to make a campaign. She gave Cindy access to all the clothes – in this case, she’s wearing Jean Paul Gaultier. So she took on this assignment but she gave back something completely unexpected; the images were not beautiful fashion images. If you look at the fists, for example, they’re clenched with white knuckles. There’s a lot of anger in the way she’s looking through that one eye, her hair in front of her face – all ways of going against the conventions of fashion photography at that time. This campaign was published in an art magazine, and you can see she signed the image with her name. So she’s conscious that she’s creating a work of art that carries her name, but is being used in advertising for a fashion boutique. She’s already playing with the conventions of being an artist, a photographer, of working in the fashion industry.”
Untitled #299, 1994
“Every time Sherman received a [fashion] commission she took it a step further, and she was provoking so much that all these commissions got refused – none were published in the 80s. Every time she got a refusal of publication, it made her push it even further. That’s really her dynamic in that decade, pushing so much against these boundaries. But then something really interesting happens in the 90s with Comme des Garçons, she’s partnering up with Rei Kawakubo who’s also a controversial designer. The fashion industry is also changing, houses like Comme become big because they are so controversial, and here you see a combination happening, these two artists creating something new and becoming bigger because they’re using each other.
“It’s also the time of heroin chic, the beginning of the 90s, where there was a lot of critique about skinny models. The fashion industry almost commodified that critique and made it an asset, it became something they were promoting, a very ambiguous dynamic. Cindy is very much part of that, with the images that she’s creating.”
Untitled #462, 2007/2008
“This is from Vogue Paris for Balenciaga, it’s the first time that she’s 100 per cent working with digital; the backgrounds and figures are both digitally captured. She’s now looking at women in high society, who want to present as being young, being part of a social group, and they do that by clothing themselves in a certain way, putting on make-up, having these accessories that match that image. It’s the first time that age becomes a real theme in her work, [and it’s] one of the main focuses here. You can clearly see Cindy Sherman herself is also part of that whole dynamic – her work is not a mockery, it’s never a cheap critique of what people are doing and how silly they are – she’s conscious of the fact that she could be one of those women. So what she’s doing is holding up a mirror also to herself, and showing us how, even if we are conscious of these crazy ideals, we are still vulnerable to them. We’re never outside of that game. I think that’s why the work resonates so much, because she always has this empathy with the figures she’s creating.”
Anti-Fashion by Cindy Sherman is on show at FOMU in Antwerp until 2 February 2025.