From February 1 to May 26 2013, Merano Arte will host Cindy Sherman’s works. Curated by Gabriele Schor, in collaboration with the Verbund Collection of Vienna, after the Vertikale Galerie in Vienna edition and that of the Centre de la photographie of Geneva, the exhibition presents 50 works realized by the American photographer and film maker from 1975 and 1977 in Buffalo, at the beginning of her career, when she was in her twenties.

The works presented in Meran are in fact from the early stage of Cindy Sherman’s career started at the State University of New York in Buffalo, when she decided to quit painting and dedicated entirely on photography. The works realized in this period are the basis of her creative path anticipating the series Untitled Film stills that she created in New York from 1977 and 1980. In these years, Cindy Sherman was influenced by the expressive forms that were emerging at the beginning of the ‘70s, like video, photography, set-ups, performances, conceptual art, and Body Art. Moreover, at the Hallwall Contemporary Arts Center in Buffalo, an exhibition center founded in November 1974 by Robert Longo and Charles Clough and fully managed by artists, she had the chance to know important visiting artists, like Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman and Chris Burden and some artists that became an example for her like Lynda Benglis, Hannah Wilke, Adrian Piper, Eleanor Antin and Suzy Lake, real role models, as they were using art in their female body.

Cindy’s Sherman youth work can be divided in three phases. The first one is dedicated to portraits. In 1975, she uses make up and mime to realize some series of photos portraying her face in real transformation. The Untitled (Growing Up) pictures face adolescence, representing the changes of physiognomy of a child becoming a girl. The second phase starts when performance entangles the entire body of the artist. Cindy Sherman takes pictures of herself in different roles and poses, assuming different identities and then cutting figures from the pictures (cut-out). Doll Clothes (1975) movies are created and many other works in which these cut-outs are overlapped and aligned. In the third phase, Cindy Sherman makes different characters interact, as in the series A Play of Selves, Bus Riders and Murder Mystery (all dated 1976).

In A Play of Selves, 244 characters and 72 scenes (4 acts and a final) are involved in a complex theatre work. The American artist represents the complex and ambivalent world of women, using different topics (e.g. craziness, desire, vanity, suffering, the sad woman, the ideal lover). In Murder Mystery, with nearly 211 cut-outs and 80 scenes, she builds a thriller with an uncertain ending, where she is the interpreter of different roles, among whom the jealous lover, the butler, the mother and the detective. Both series have an articulated structure and follow a refined storyboard: each character has a different dimension according to the scene. The number of the scenes is determined by the availability of the exhibition space; Cindy Sherman puts them directly on the wall hung at eye level creating in this way a great set-up.

The complex youth work by Cindy Sherman comes from a conceptual and performing creative process. Due to the fugitive nature of the set-up, many cut-outs, as for example the Bus Riders, are lost. In the years spent in Buffalo, for the first time, Cindy Sherman promotes the metamorphosis game to an artistic level of the project taking many photos still unpublished and reunifying different elements of theatre and cinema. Starting 35 years ago, she interprets and re-interprets the entire variety of roles and feminine identities.

A catalogue of the exhibition is available - Hatje Cantz Verlag (in German and English) – curated by Gabriele Schor who worked with Cindy Sherman for three years.

Cindy Sherman is one of the most important contemporary artists. Born on January 19 1954 in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, in 1972 she started working at the State University College in Buffalo and in 1976 she took a Bachelor of Arts. Since Summer 1977 she lives and works in New York City. In 1982 she participated to documenta 7 and in 1987 the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York hosted her first retrospect. She presented her works in exhibitions at the Jeu de Paume in Paris, at the Kunsthaus in Bregenz, at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art and at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin. She’s been awarded with prestigious prizes and her works are hosted in the collections of many famous museums such as the Tate Gallery of London, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington D.C., the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of New York. In February 2012, the Museum of Modern Art of New York hosted a wide retrospect dedicated to her, an itinerant exhibition that will be hosted in the Museum of Modern Art of San Francisco, the Walker Art Center of Minneapolis and the Dallas Museum of Art, in Dallas.

Merano Arte
Via Portici, 163
Merano (BZ) 39012 Italy
Ph. +39 0473 212643
info@kunstmeranoarte.org
www.kunstmeranoarte.org

Opening hours
From Tuesday to Sunday
10.00am - 6.00pm