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Issue 235

Cindy Sherman’s Baroque Beauties

At ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, an exhibition dedicated to tapestries continues the artist's interest in the construction of persona through social media

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BY Alice Godwin in EU Reviews , Exhibition Reviews | 09 MAR 23

The golden age of tapestry arrived in Brussels during the fifteenth century, when Burgundian dukes lined their palaces with woven scenes of morality and religion. Since then, tapestry has remained the medium of privilege and royalty, associated with wealth, prosperity and the palaces of Europe. With that in mind, it feels curiously incongruous when a contemporary artist such as Cindy Sherman turns her attention to this historic practice. Yet, in a radical shift, Sherman – who has spent the past 45 years transforming herself into damsels, vamps, ageing Hollywood starlets and ghoulish clowns through her photography – began producing textile-based work in 2019. ‘Tapestries’, currently on view at ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, marks the series’ first outing at a European museum.

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Cindy Sherman, Untitled #605, 2019, cotton, wool, acrylic, cotton, mercurisé and polyester cotton woven together, 2.8 × 2.1 m. Courtesy: © the artist, Sprüth Magers and Hauser & Wirth; photograph: Robert Wedemeyer

In an interview for Vogue published in 2021, Sherman told Liam Freeman that she had first considered making tapestries more than a decade earlier. It wasn’t until four years ago, however, that she realized she had the perfect subject for textile works: her Instagram selfies (2017–ongoing), whose low-resolution pixels had similar qualities to woven threads. Created in collaboration with Belgian master weavers, each of the 13 tapestries on display is based on a selfie from Sherman’s Instagram account, which is inhabited by stretched, polished and filtered characters made using appearance-altering apps like Facetune and Perfect365. In a 2016 interview with The New York Times, Sherman described social media as ‘vulgar’, but it seems the artist has subsequently embraced the realm of possibilities afforded by such digital tools.

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Cindy Sherman, Untitled #606, 2020, cotton, wool, acrylic, cotton, mercurisé and polyester cotton woven together, 2.8 × 2.1 m. Courtesy: © the artist, Sprüth Magers and Hauser & Wirth; photograph: Robert Wedemeyer 

There is the middle-aged woman, playing the part of the blonde bombshell, with her cat eyeliner, pink lips and filter of floating hearts and stars (Untitled #607, 2020). There is the goo-goo-eyed woman crowned with petals in Untitled #604 (2019), who looks like an Instagram version of Ilona Staller in Jeff Koons’s 1989 series ‘Made in Heaven’. Sherman’s selfies riff on the youthful contortions that social media encourages, veering towards the voluptuous or the babyish in works such as Untitled #606 (2020), which depicts a woman wearing a childish polka dot bow.

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Cindy Sherman, Untitled #625, 2021, cotton, wool, acrylic, cotton, mercurisé and polyester cotton woven together, 2.8 × 2.1 m. Courtesy: © the artist, Sprüth Magers and Hauser & Wirth; photograph: Robert Wedemeyer 

At the other end of the spectrum is the downright grotesque, as ageing wrinkles and sunspots are smoothed (Untitled #621, 2020) or wraiths appear on the brink of death (Untitled #625, 2021). Sherman’s figures bristle at the baroque extremes of beauty, ugliness and the bizarre, from the clownish (Untitled #616, 2020) to the edges of gender (Untitled #617, 2020). We are confronted by the infinite possibilities of social media, where we all have the means to become anyone.

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Cindy Sherman, Untitled #620, 2020, cotton, wool, acrylic, cotton, mercurisé and polyester cotton woven together, 2.8 × 2.1 m. Courtesy: © the artist, Sprüth Magers and Hauser & Wirth; photograph: Robert Wedemeyer 

At times, Sherman’s characters dissolve into their backgrounds – lost amongst clouds, mountains, icy forests and lakes. The abundant landscape of Untitled #620 (2020), for instance, evokes the symbolically rich and exquisitely rendered tapestries designed by William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones of the 19th-century arts and crafts and pre-Raphaelite movements. Sherman’s works also spark associations with textile art’s traditional biblical subjects: the woman’s deeply flushed cheeks, pleading gesture and clenched teeth in Untitled #605 (2019) conjure the spiritual bliss of Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1647–52).

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Cindy Sherman, Untitled #623 (detail), 2021, cotton, wool, acrylic, cotton, mercurisé and polyester cotton woven together, 2.8 × 2.1 m. Courtesy: © the artist, Sprüth Magers and Hauser & Wirth; photograph: Robert Wedemeyer 

In tapestry form, these ephemeral selfies – akin to those we frequently scroll past on Instagram – assert their presence. Silver threads catch the light as others suggest a velvety impasto, like the topographical surface of paint. It would be a mistake, however, to assign value based on the seemingly painstaking, handmade nature of these textiles, which have, in fact, been digitally printed. Their power is not in their craftsmanship, but in their negotiation of identity. In the aforementioned interview with Vogue, Sherman suggested she wasn’t sure how much further Instagram could take her. By harnessing the unexpected medium of tapestry, the artist demonstrates there is still ground left to tread.

Cindy Shermans Tapestries is on view at Aarhus Art Museum until 5 June

Main image: Cindy Sherman, Untitled #620 (detail), 2020, cotton, wool, acrylic, cotton, mercurisé and polyester cotton woven together, 2.8 × 2.1 m. Courtesy: © the artist, Sprüth Magers and Hauser & Wirth. Photograph: Robert Wedemeyer

Alice Godwin is an arts writer, editor and researcher based in Copenhagen, Denmark

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