Cindy Sherman at Hauser & Wirth

Renowned photographic artist (and Buffalo State College graduate!) Cindy Sherman has a show of over 100 works, focusing on her early career, currently on view at Hauser & Wirth, 32 E 69th Street. The gallery is easy to reach (for instance, via the 6 to 68th Street/Hunter College) and with the nice weather on, you really should try to see the show before it closes on July 30.

What I wanted to do is give you a few (very few) words to guide you through it... to begin, when you enter the gallery, you'll see an explanatory paragraph that will give you most of the background info you'll need. From there, I might suggest you take the elevator up to the 3rd floor and start your tour from there; I think the black and whites are Cindy's earliest works, if you want to be sequential about it. Here you'll find Cindy in the process of discovering herself and her place in the world; a tiny figure slipping somewhat furtively through massive religious, municipal and museum architecture. You might keep the word confronting in mind as you go through the show; she almost always has a confrontational attitude about her, and rarely in an aggressive way, more as if she's looking over her shoulder. escaping one dilemma as she unwittingly walks right into another. More than once she reminds me of Hitchcock's heroines from the 60's, most notably Tippi Hedren's Marnie... anonymous women who are constantly changing appearances and identities as plans go wrong and getting out of town quickly just to survive becomes the priority...

As she progresses into color, her technical ability grows as well. The compositions become looser, her own placement in the frame more varied, the focus is not always perfect, but there is almost always that elusive, transient sense of being on the run...

The show finally opens out on the first floor to the monumental, fully-realized prints that are astonishing for their size (approx. 45"x30") and technical accomplishment alone. The confrontational attitude continues, here turned toward the viewer a bit more, but it also shows her own visage disappearing entirely in one case, (Untitled, 1982) as she gets involved at looking closely at the texture, the patterns and the lighting on the garment she's wearing...

So there you have it. There's as a study on the third floor that includes much literature, some of which breaks Cindy's work down into series, "Clowns", etc., but the show does not really do that, the photos are not titled, so I didn't respond to it that way myself.

"Cindy Sherman 1977-1982" will be up until July 30. JPM.