Cindy Sherman

The art world’s icon, Cindy Sherman, is coming to Fotografiska with her exhibition Tapestries, where she explores a completely new medium. In Tapestries, Sherman interprets her distorted Instagram selfies as epic tapestries, with portraits exploring identity, gender roles, and the nature of representation. Tapestries is this spring’s major exhibition at Fotografiska, running from February 10 until June 9.

TRANSLATES THE MODERN PHENOMENON OF TRANSIENT SELFIES

Few artists define the postmodern era like Cindy Sherman. She is widely recognized for her photographic series, where she transforms herself into different characters and examines such topics as identity and gender roles. In 2017, a new series emerged on her Instagram account where she posted distorted “selfies” as a commentary on the phenomenon of face-altering apps. These selfies have been translated into enormous tapestries for this spring’s major exhibition at Fotografiska Stockholm: Tapestries.

Here, she translates the modern phenomenon of transient selfies into one of the world’s oldest and most enduring traditional crafts: tapestries. Cindy Sherman has embarked on a groundbreaking artistic endeavor by delving into a non-photographic medium for the first time. This marks a departure from her almost five decades-long use of photography.

"Since the images did not have high enough resolution to be printed on a large scale, the pixels were translated into warp and weft of thread. The transition from low-resolution digital images to woven textiles also imparts a tactile quality to the works that is impossible to achieve with digital tools,” says Exhibition Producer Sofia Liljergren.

The artworks in the exhibition are crafted from cotton, wool, acrylic, and polyester using a traditional craft from Belgium, a region with a rich history of tapestry-making stretching back to the 15th century. Each tapestry portrays different characters, where Sherman manipulates elements like hair and eye color, skin tone, facial features, and gender.

"To exhibit Cindy Sherman is truly fantastic and a personal dream of mine - she is an outstanding artist. I'm particularly excited about her exploration of the textile tapestries, which with their enormous scale form an exciting symbiosis between contemporary Instagram photos and ancient textile weaving," says Elin Frendberg, CEO of Fotografiska Stockholm.

ABOUT CINDY SHERMAN

Born in 1954 in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, Cindy Sherman lives and works in New York. Her ground-breaking photographs have interrogated themes around representation and identity in contemporary media for over four decades. Coming to prominence in the late 1970s with the Pictures Generation group, Sherman studied art at Buffalo State College in 1972 where she turned her attention to photography. In 1977, shortly after moving to New York, Sherman began her critically acclaimed Untitled Film Stills. A suite of 69 black and white portraits, Untitled Film Stills sees Sherman impersonate a myriad of stereotypical female characters and caricatures inspired by Hollywood pictures, film noir, and B movies. Using a range of costumes, props and backdrops to manipulate her own appearance and to create photographs resembling promotional film images, the series explores the tension between artifice and identity in consumer culture which has preoccupied the artist’s practice ever since.