Perhaps because her work so frequently appears in exhibitions, art fairs and auctions, it seems as though Cindy Sherman’s photographs are often with us. Think of images of her as a clown, a Renaissance Madonna, a sex kitten or even a half-pig, half-human creature. But in the United States it has been nearly 14 years since the public has had a chance to examine the breadth of her work in one place. Now, a comprehensive retrospective is in the works at the Museum of Modern Art, where it is scheduled to open a year from now.
MoMA is a logical place since it has been collecting her work in depth for years. In 1995 it paid a reported $1 million to acquire all 69 black-and-white film stills from a series in which she enacted stereotypical female movie roles.
The retrospective is the first since the
Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles organized a traveling one in 1997 that bypassed New York. This “seemed like the right time,” said Eva Respini, an associate curator in
MoMA’s photography department who is organizing the show. “There a whole younger generation who hasn’t had the chance to see the sweep of her career.”
The show, “Cindy Sherman,” scheduled to open on Feb. 26, 2012, will chronicle her work from the mid-1970s on and include more than 170 photographs. Loans from public and private collections will supplement MoMA’s holdings. The first thing visitors will see, Ms. Respini said, is a series Ms. Sherman recently created. It is actually different kinds of wallpaper with pictures of Central Park and life-size images of Ms. Sherman posing in costume with props like a sword or juggling clubs. Examples of the work were included in “Sexuality and Transcendence,” a group show at the Pinchuk Art Center in Kiev, Ukraine, last year and several were on display at
Art Basel in Switzerland in June.
The MoMA retrospective will be thematic. There will be rooms devoted to Ms. Sherman’s explorations of subjects like the grotesque, with images of mutilated bodies and abject landscapes, as well as a room with a dozen centerfolds, a takeoff of men’s magazines, in which she depicts herself in guises ranging from a sultry seductress to a vulnerable victim. There will also be a room that shows her work critiquing the fashion industry and stereotypical depictions of women.
ART AND ARIAS
When it opened in 2006, Gallery Met — a 1,500-square-foot space in the south lobby of the
Metropolitan Opera House — was an effort to restart a dialogue between contemporary art and
opera. Now the New York painter
Elizabeth Peyton has ventured beyond the gallery’s walls and into the opera house itself.
Her exhibition, “Wagner,” based on characters from the “Ring” cycle, opens next Friday. Not only has Ms. Peyton covered the gallery’s white walls with the same red velvet that envelops the opera house, she is also creating a treasure hunt throughout the Met.
“Her work will be on every level of the house,” said Dodie Kazanjian, director of the gallery. “She’s an artist making a huge, risky leap, taking Wagner and making him common, contemporary currency, work that relates to our time.”
Opera audiences will be able to spot her work in the glass case at the top of the grand staircase, where costumes are usually on view, and in less obvious locations, like the lower level, where archival opera material is often displayed.
In the Gallery Met itself will hang Ms. Peyton’s paintings, drawings and prints depicting many of Wagner’s mythic characters, among them Fricka and Wotan; there will also be etchings and drawings of Valkyries and Rhinemaidens. “She’s taken that big, operatic sweep of love and all the tragedies that go with it and in the process has referenced artists like
Roy Lichtenstein,” Ms. Kazanjian said. “But she’s done it in a way that is not corny.”
The show is the second pegged to
Robert Lepage’s new production of the “Ring” cycle. The first, in the fall, was “Notations After the Ring,” an exhibition by the artist Julie Mehretu, timed to the performance of “Das Rheingold.” Mr. Lepage’s second installment — “Die Walküre” — will have its premiere on April 22.
For those who want to see the art without taking in the performance, free, by-appointment-only tours of the exhibition will be available starting next Friday. Tours maybe be scheduled by e-mail:
peytontours@metopera.org. More information is one the
Met’s Web site.
A NEW CHELSEA GALLERY
There will soon be yet another place to see art in Chelsea, and this one — the Walther Collection Project Space — is a nonprofit gallery that will show only about three exhibitions a year. Each will be drawn from the holdings of the Walther Family Foundation, whose founder, Artur Walther, is a collector and retired Goldman Sachs partner. He serves on the photography committees of museums like the
Whitney Museum of American Art and the
Vassar College Art Gallery, and is a board member of the
International Center of Photography. His collection is focused primarily on the work of emerging artists from Africa and Asia.
The foundation’s New York space, on the seventh floor of the West Chelsea Arts Building, 526 West 26th Street, will open on April 15. It is a small offshoot of the
Walther Collection, a four-building campus in Neu-Ulm, Germany.
The foundation’s first New York exhibition will feature the South African photographer Jo Ractliffe. Plans also call for a show in September analyzing the Malian portraitist Seydou Keïta, who died in 2001, and the German portrait and documentary photographer August Sander, who died in 1964. African photography will be the subject of a show in 2012, Mr. Walther said.
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