In my eyes, a book might well be the perfect gift: chosen correctly, it can feel deeply personal – an expression of your knowledge of the recipient’s interests and enthusiasms, whether their desire to be engrossed in a novel or adorn their coffee table with an aesthetically pleasing art monograph.

Here, we offer a line-up of gifts for the style aficionado – a selection of fashion books, all released in 2025, that offer a wide-ranging and visually lush survey of contemporary style, from retrospective compendiums on the work of fashion provocateurs Rick Owens and Jean Paul Gaultier to weighty volumes on Loewe and Louis Vuitton. Alongside are thoughtful studies on the Black Dandy – accompanying this year’s Costume Institute exhibition at The Met – and a deep-thinking exploration of fashion imagery and the domestic space.

Chosen by the Wallpaper* style editors to inspire, intrigue and delight, they are an invitation to contribute to your loved one’s fashion library – or simply build your own.

The Women is an acerbic and witty all-female play set among Manhattan’s moneyed elite. Clare Boothe Luce’s ageless comedy, a 1936 Broadway hit, follows a seemingly content socialite whose life turns on its head when she learns of her husband’s affair. Surrounded by an equally image-conscious, socially astute, and gossip-fuelled circle, she navigates betrayal, pride, and quiet reinvention. With a stellar cast led by Norma Shearer and Joan Crawford, the 1939 screen adaptation brilliantly retains the play’s sharp observational tone and wit, as does, to an extent, the 2008 remake.

The Women critiques and celebrates in equal measure – dissecting the performative reality of womanhood. It explores the layered codes, the pressures and the privileges, while acknowledging female solidarity and resilience. In this, it shares common ground with the work of the artist Cindy Sherman, whose new exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Menorca, ‘Cindy Sherman. The Women’, takes its title, literally and playfully.

Sherman’s first solo exhibition in Spain in over two decades, ‘The Women’ brings together key works from the 1970s to the 2010s – shown without a fixed timeline – to reconsider her legacy in light of today’s image economy, where identity is crafted for digital audiences and self-curation goes unquestioned.

In many ways, Sherman feels like the biographer of our world today. From the start of her career, she’s forensically dissected the ways we inhabit images. Her carefully constructed, highly performative, often cinematic works spoke to audiences way before the language of influencers and personal branding became part of the everyday. ‘She was decades ahead of our current moment of social media and the construction of identity for the camera,’ says the exhibition curator Tanya Barson.

Her artwork unpacks the layers of visual identity, examining how it’s constructed, projected and consumed, and the gazes in which women are subjected. Each persona she adopts is both clearly a mask and a mirror, reflecting the roles women are assigned, expected to play, sometimes reclaim. That this process now plays out across millions of screens daily across the globe makes Sherman’s explorations feel uncannily timely.

Hauser & Wirth Menorca, tucked away on the idyllic Illa del Rei just off the coast of Mahón harbour, invites moments of quiet contemplation. The island setting also sets the tone in the opening gallery, which features works from Sherman’s Ominous Landscapes (2010). Here, female figures dressed in haute couture (from original 1920s Coco Chanel pieces to later designs by Karl Lagerfeld) are digitally superimposed onto island scenes, from Capri to Shelter Island. There’s a sense of dislocation to these spectral women – their scale and presence slightly off, mirroring the disconnect between image and environment, and perhaps our current reality.

Themes of status and self-image continue in the Society Portraits (2008) and the 2016 Harper’s Bazaar commission. In both, women pose in lavish clothing and constructed settings, sometimes multiplied via exposure. The image becomes an echo chamber of aspiration, of artifice, of identity under scrutiny.

Perhaps more powerful is the Flappers (2016–2018) series. Sherman’s admiration for these women who challenged social norms and redefined fashion in the 1920s as acts of empowerment, emancipation and radical modernity is evident. The characters are handled with theatrical flair but without cruelty, with subtle nods to the visual language of the artist and photographer Otto Dix and August Sander. ‘There’s humour,’ says Barson, ‘but also a really intense identification,’ adding that one cannot assume a character ‘with this degree of proximity and accuracy without being somewhat sympathetic.’

Included here are Sherman’s seminal Untitled Film Stills (1977–1980) – the black-and-white photographs that propelled her to prominence as part of the Pictures Generation artists who were back then responding to mass media and celebrity. In each, Sherman styles herself and poses as various archetypal female characters (housewife, career girl, lonely city dweller) in the manner of starlets and scenes from mid-20th-century B-movies, film noir, art-house cinema. These are fabricated memories of cinematic tropes, for a sense of déjà vu without ever being recognisable.

‘These are scenes from films we think we’ve seen, but they don’t exist,’ explains Barson. ‘There is a sophistication in the way she presents the figure in a landscape or interior – the way she uses distance, close-up, framing. It’s highly cinematic.’

Also on view in the final galleries, and interesting to observe now as the world transforms by tech, are early works such as Bus Riders and Murder Mystery (1976), which laid the foundations for her interest in character, performance and process. They seem naïve, charming even. As we observe a young girl in oversized jeans slouched on a bus bench Barson remarks, ‘there’s always a sense that we recognise these women, not just from cinema or media, but from real life. We’ve seen them on the bus, in our families, sometimes in ourselves.’

She says Sherman has been visualising much of the theorising we’ve been trying to do. ‘Her work provides the space for theory to operate,’ she notes. Taken together, the works in ‘The Women’ feel eerily contemporary. At a time when we are all, in some sense, performing ourselves for anonymous audiences, not always to great effect, Sherman’s lifelong investigation into the performance of the self could not be timelier.

‘This isn’t a comprehensive retrospective. It’s a reintroduction,’ says Barson. ‘Many of the works haven’t been seen in Spain before. It made sense to follow a non-linear curation, to allow people to meet these images in fresh ways before returning to the more iconic works.’

On this quiet island, surrounded by Piet Oudolf’s wild gardens and the glimmer of the Mediterranean, Sherman’s work takes on a new rhythm. These images – so deliberately staged – feel even more constructed here, set against nature’s ease. They remind us how much identity is curated, not inherited. And just as The Women revealed the roles women are expected to play, Sherman’s characters, too, hold a mirror to the performances of modern life. As Barson notes, Sherman may well find new audiences at Illa del Rei – visitors unfamiliar with her practice, encountering it anew in this unexpected setting.

‘Cindy Sherman. The Women’ is at Hauser & Wirth Menorca until 26 October 2025

‘Masquerade, Make-Up & Ensor’, a new exhibition at MoMu in Antwerp, examines the correlation between James Ensor and contemporary creative figures. A founding member of the avant-garde group Les XX, Ensor is championed as one of Belgium’s great proto-modernist artists.

Throughout his practice, ‘the mask’ was a recurring motif, often referencing the make-up trends of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. As art historian Susan M Canning observes of the painter and printmaker’s work, ‘masking, make-up and arrangements of masks […] promote the disruptive and transgressive subterfuge of artifice’.

Inside ‘Masquerade, Make-Up & Ensor’ at MoMu – Fashion Museum Antwerp

‘Ensor was a perfect way to feature make-up and hairstylists in MoMu for the first time,’ says Elisa De Wyngaert, who co-curated the show with Kaat Debo and Romy Cockx. ‘But also a way to discuss beauty ideals and everything surrounding the fashion industry.’

Also central to the exhibition’s genesis were three points of exploration that De Wyngaert, Debo and Cockx wanted to highlight: Why do we wear masks? Why are people so afraid of visible ageing? How do we deal with ideals of beauty that are always changing and are impossible to achieve?

The multimedia works on display span paintings, photographs, scrapbooks, mannequins, videos and more. A small series of paintings by Ensor marks the start of the exhibition, followed by self-portraits of mammoth proportions by Issy Wood, highlighting the painter’s discomfort with being photographed. Elsewhere, Genieve Figgis’ ‘grotesque and beautiful’ characters hang on canvases against the backdrop of lilac curtains decorated with huge bows (a highlight of Janina Pedan’s exhibition design).

American photographer Bruce Gilden’s disarming close-ups of his subjects are mirrored in a selection of Cindy Sherman’s Head Shots series, while artist Tschabalala Self explores the idea of persona and politics. ‘A lot of the time beauty ideals reflect the politics you want to align yourself with,’ she considers on a nearby wall panel. ‘People often underestimate the political aspect of beauty.’

From the worlds of fashion and pop culture, Pat McGrath’s viral ‘porcelain doll’ make-up, conceived for John Galliano’s Maison Margiela 2024 Spring Summer Artisanal collection is presented with Another Galliano fixture, the ‘Rosalie’ doll. The latter can be found in a space dedicated to the master of hair Julien d’Ys, as well as a cloud-like sculpture he created for Wallpaper* in 2022. Items from Rihanna’s Fenty line and Martin Parr’s 2019 beauty campaign for Gucci both make cameos.

Perhaps the most significant, however, is the contribution of make-up artist Inge Grognard. Here, the looks she created for Maison Martin Margiela between 1988 and 2008 are shown almost like posters, the respective products used to create them hanging in sandwich bags below, while a video of Grognard today concludes the exhibition. ‘The film is very special; you don’t often hear the voice of make-up artists,’ notes De Wyngaert.

‘I am still flabbergasted by the amount of research [hair and make-up artists do]; they are true painters of fashion, the way they draw, the preparations,’ she continues. ‘True artists just working in a different medium. I didn’t think make-up was superficial [before], but the quality of the work, the reflection and depth, is something I’m just stunned by.’

For Cockx, whose focus was specific to the work and social landscape of Ensor, surprise was reserved for the language – and attitudes – surrounding make-up application. ‘What really struck me was, when looking at the fashion magazines from the 19th century, they literally compare make-up to applying paint [on a canvas],’ she adds.

Though not explicitly gendered, ‘Masquerade, Make-Up & Ensor’ strongly focuses on women, with whom the eccentric and opinionated Ensor had a complicated relationship. His 1925 poem, On Women, for example, is a deeply misogynistic text. Yet he also lived with – and frequently painted – his mother, aunt and sister.

‘Women wearing too much make-up is still perceived as, “what is she hiding?” not “oh, she wants to express herself”,’ suggests De Wyngaert. ‘There’s so much judgment; both in Ensor’s time and still today. It’s this kind of impossibility – how do you ever win? That is something we wanted to leave space for. Women constantly feel they are not in charge of their own bodies – we wanted to explore where these fears or anxieties come from.’

In a later scene, fears of ageing are projected onto a would-be bride. Surrounded by a sheer curtain, she stands before a three-piece mirror, the extravagance of a Christian Lacroix gown mirrored in her hair, which is piled high in an exaggerated style that riffs on the beehive.

‘That was the most experimental installation, with Cyndia Harvey,’ shares De Wyngaert, alluding to the revered British hairstylist. ‘It was an idea from a previous interview with Lacroix for “Echo: Wrapped in Memory”. He told me about this obsession with Miss Havisham and that planted the seed. I hope it gives some strength, acknowledgement and empowerment to ageing women, or ageing people for that matter,’ she concludes.

‘Masquerade, Make-up & Ensor’ is on display at MoMu - Fashion Museum Antwerp until 2 February 2025

momu.be

Cindy Sherman has long been fascinated with the concept of a persona, dismantling archetypes with unflinching portraits. Evocations of familiar faces – Madonna with child, ageing socialites, film stars – become unfamiliar through Sherman’s lens, distorted with props, filters and digital manipulations.

Cindy Sherman at Hauser & Wirth New York

It is this latter method to which Sherman has returned for a new exhibition at Hauser & Wirth New York, with 30 new works playfully reconstructing the parameters of the face. Sherman uses her own features for the puzzle-like works, collaging the elements of her face to create brand-new characters. By inhabiting the role of both subject and artist, Sherman shifts the dynamic away from the traditional relationship with the sitter, sidestepping its discomfiting voyeurism.

In the clean works – Sherman has stripped back all external detailing, letting the heads take centre stage – the fictional subjects adopt the familiar expression of a sitter, their quiet endurance emphasised by the clearly inhuman contours of their faces. Sherman has left in the marks of collage, with the distortions revealing the hand-cutting and colouring of her methods, in a nod to the complicated nature of identity and the disparity between who we are and how we present ourselves. 

Like her use of make-up, prosthetics and wigs, the digital manipulations here create new characters out of familiar forms – in this case her own – to illustrate the layers that go into an identity, the unsettling results of which are explored in these new works. 

‘Cindy Sherman’, at Hauser & Wirth New York, from 18 January – 16 March 2024

hauserwirth.com

Cindy Sherman is a dab hand at deconstructing herself. For four decades, the artist has moved through many transformations and transfigurations, using her own face and body as a proxy for society’s divided selves. She has mastered this to such a degree that many may not recognise the ‘real’ Cindy Sherman, only her many, captivating guises. 

Now, during Zurich Art Week 2023, she will take on another, harnessing digital tools that have formed a key facet of her practice since 2000. In the new works on view at Hauser & Wirth Zurich, Sherman has collaged parts of her own face through digital manipulation tools to piece together the identities of various characters. In physicality, the portraits are about Sherman, but in reference to society at large, they are about modernity and the many fractured selves that lurk within it. 

In these new works, there are no scenic backdrops, or mise-en-scène, and each uses limited props. A digital collaging technique – using black and white and colour photographs – is merged with other traditional modes of character transformation, such as make-up, wigs and costumes. 

The results are uncanny, amusing and borderline grotesque as Sherman’s sitters (which don’t technically exist) laugh, grimace or snarl in confusion in front of the camera. This act of digital warping, sampling and remodelling is reminiscent of Sherman’s previous work using physical prosthetics, such as History Portraits (1988) or Masks from the 1990s. Then, as now, the prosthetic machinations were left intentionally exposed, destroying any hope of illusion. 

Sherman photographed isolated parts of her body – her eyes, nose, lips, skin, hair, and ears – which are then cut, pasted and superimposed onto a foundational image. Some collaged elements are less obvious than others; the seams jarring with their subtlety. The cut-and-paste remixes in some are tangible, such as Untitled #631 (2010/2023) and Untitled #652 (2023), where Sherman remixes black and white and coloured fragments. 

The Zurich exhibition comes at something of a moment for Sherman, who is currently staging two museum shows: ‘Cindy Sherman – Tapestries’ at ARoS Aarhus Art Museum in Denmark, and ‘Cindy Sherman: Anti-Fashion’ at Staatsgalerie Stuttgart in Germany. 

Cindy Sherman's show will run at Hauser & Wirth Zurich, Limmatstrasse, 9 June – 16 September 2023. hauserwirth.com

Milan's Expo is still one month away, but the very first pavilion dedicated to the universal exhibition - and the only one that will be located in the city centre -  has opened its doors inside Milan's Triennale Design Museum. Entitled 'Arts & Foods: Rituals since 1851', the exhibition takes on the Expo's overarching theme of sustainable food but peers at it with an artistic lens. And the results are, in a word, delectable.

Curated by Germano Celant, the prolific artistic director of the Prada Foundation and curator of Milan's Fondazione Aldo Rossi, the exhibition sprawls across the entire 7,000 square metres of the museum, including its outdoor garden. It's like a never-ending feast of food-related objects, tools, paintings, installations, rooms and ambiences from 1851 to the present.

The first room of the exhibition, dedicated to the period between 1851 and 1948, is the most densely packed, cohesively designed and powerfully conceived. It features a fascinating mix of antique cooking tools, kitchen furniture and butcher stations to real Florentine bars from the early 20th century that have been painstakingly reconstructed, bottle-by-bottle. A magnificent collection of antique silverware, loaned by Milan's famous G. Lorenzi cutlery company, is on show, as are thoughtful portraits of chefs by Monet and Manet and an array of mid-century kitchen accessories.

Other rooms are dedicated to the 1950s, 60s and 70s, as well as to contemporary art's dealings with food. It's a tribute to Celant's profile that he's managed to wrangle top works by major artists such as Andy Warhol ('The Last Supper' and his infamous Campbell's soup cans), Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman, Tom Sachs, Marc Quinn and Urs Fischer (whose 'Bread House' smells just a little bit stale after nearly 10 years of circulation), even though their assembly makes less impact than the first historical room. No matter; Paul McCarthy's giant, inflatable ketchup bottle, which has been planted in the centre of the Triennale's lush park like a plastic skyscraper, makes up for it.

Also noteworthy is Gaetano Pesce's site-specific installation (the only one in the whole museum) which features giant pieces of kitchenware on a glass floor along with a group of actors chatting, cooking and fighting (what kitchen hasn't seen that?), all visible by nosy viewers looking up from the floor beneath.

This ambitious exhibit shines the spotlight on Milan's Triennale, shaking up this sometimes sleepy institution just in time for the Expo. Not only is the green garden in full aperitivo action but it also has water in its fountains for the first time in 50 years, thanks to the restoration of Giorgio de Chirico's 'Bagni Misteriosi'.  In tandem with the brimming activity is a proper - and long overdue - restaurant opening up on the museum's first floor that features a balcony overlooking the park.

ADDRESS

Triennale di Milano
Viale Alemagna 6
Milan 20121

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A multifaceted approach to the female gaze is explored in an exhibition curated by fashion designer Simone Rocha.

‘Girls Girls Girls,’ taking place at Lismore Castle Arts, unites work from a diverse selection of artists including Sophie Barber, Louise Bourgeois, Elene Chantladze, Petra Collins, Sian Costello, Dorothy Cross, Genieve Figgis, Iris Haeussler, Eimear Lynch & Domino Whisker, Roni Horn, Cassi Namoda, Sharna Osborne, Josiane M.H. Pozi, Cindy Sherman, Alina Szapocznikow, Harley Weir, Francesca Woodman and Luo Yang.

A juxtaposition of media forms, encompassing art, sculpture and photography, subvert the traditional concepts of femininity. In ‘Stilletos’ by Dorothy Cross, shoes in cowhide and cow teat muse on the role of the absurd in fashion. Unsettling issues of identity take shape in Francesca Woodman’s self-portrait. Classic motifs are given a subversive twist in Sian Costello’s self-portraits in oil, while Elene Chantladze’s images on stone have a nightmarish quality.

‘I wanted to bring together artists who make powerful, provocative work and have them together in the space, sharing the underlying femininity of the pieces,’ says Rocha. ‘I wanted to explore the works of these inspirational artists and for them to share a space together.’

The exhibition brings established artists such as Cindy Sherman and Roni Horn together with those emerging, including Sophie Barber, Luo Yang and Genieve Figgis. When viewed collectively, the works tap into a disturbing alternative reality, with haunting self-portraiture reflecting an internal narrative unique to each artist. The contrasting media, when viewed together, presents a multi-faceted exploration of femininity.

It is a dichotomy Rocha herself explores in her own work, juxtaposing traditionally feminine silhouettes against masculine tailoring. ‘The female spirit and experience have been a strong focus of my work from the beginning,’ she says. ‘I am always pushing to make something traditionally feminine in a modern, off-kilter world. In this exhibition, I wanted to explore the works of these inspirational artists and for them to share a space together.’

INFORMATION                                                                                                                                       The Listmore Castle Arts 2002 exhibition takes place April 2 - October 30 2022
lismorecastlearts.ie

Few artists have predicted the future quite like Cindy Sherman. Before social media, before face filters, before selfies and RuPaul's Drag Race, her chameleon-like portraits summoned us to interrogate identity and its construction. Manhattan’s ageing socialites in Society Portraits (2008), monstrous femininity in Sex Pictures (1992), Madonna with child in History Portraits (1988-1990) are just some of the many faces that stare back in a landmark new exhibition of Sherman’s portraits at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, which runs until January 2021.

Designed in close collaboration with Sherman, the retrospective is the largest ever display of the artist’s works in Europe, bringing together 170 of her portraits from eighteen series created between 1975 to 2020 including Rear Screen Projections (1980), Disasters (1986 -1987), Clowns (2003 - 2004), Murals (2010) and Collages (2015). Shown alongside newer full-colour works such as Headshots (2000) and Flappers (2016-2018), the images from her breakthrough series Untitled Film Stills take on a new significance. Unnerving, compelling and enigmatic in equal measure, the 70 black and white portraits shot between 1977 and 1980, imagined a series of screen sirens and cinematic archetypes from an unknown, unnamed film. Just like today’s social media influencers, Sherman plays the role of make-up artist, director, stylist, props master, photographer and model, but as with all of her works, it is the absence of the artist herself that continues to fascinate.

When asked if she considers her works to be self-portraits Sherman has said: ‘Technically, maybe they are, but I don’t see these characters as myself’. Indeed it is our imagined selves, fabled narratives, vanity and vulnerability that we locate in her works, familiar and disconcerting. The scenography of the exhibition designed by architect Marco Palmieri amplifies this, with mirrors placed along the exhibition path and a sequence of circular spaces surrounding each of the artist’s series, enveloping the viewers as if they were facing a multi-faceted vanity mirror. The colour palette also is derived from the shades the artist uses as make-up: bright yellow from her eyeshadow, deep pink from a lipstick.

Not surprisingly, Instagram has become a natural home for Sherman. Her account, previously private and then made public in 2017, features personal images alongside familiar character portraits and eerie, augmented selfies where she experiments with face filters. The retrospective brings this to life with a room dedicated to her most recent series Tapestries which debuted at Art Basel Miami in 2019. Tapestries sees Sherman explore a new, non-photographic medium, taking manipulated images from the artist’s own Instagram feed and printing them in the weft of a weave combining cotton, wool, acrylic and sometimes silk. Transposing the digital image onto textiles sees the images distort and pixelate, creating an uncanny continuum between the virtual and material worlds.

For curator and artistic director of the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Suzanne Pagé, this embrace of modern technology and techniques locates Sherman within a distinctly female trajectory in art history. ‘Her “games with identity” have often been placed in a tradition that goes from the Comtesse de Castiglione to Claude Cahun and Ana Mendieta, among others,’ Pagé explains in the exhibition catalogue: ‘For so long, women were excluded from the ‘noble’ territory of painting, which was already taken over, and the few who did venture there seem like survivors. Forced to work on the margins, they developed a particular appetite for appropriating new media.’ Beginning as a painter and then turning to photography early on in her artistic career, Sherman has transitioned from analogue to digital in an ongoing process. ‘In doing so, she has constantly reinvented her medium, being quick to combine the edgiest tools (Photoshop, Instagram) with traditional supports like tapestry in a way that ignores rules or prohibitions.’ 

For Pagé, who collaborated closely with the artist on the retrospective and Crossing Views – a concurrent exhibition of portraits and self-portraits from the Fondation’s Collection – the artist has effectively created her own medium, unlike anything else being done today. ‘She imposes her total singularity, giving herself up entirely while merely lending herself to the game. Although she is supposed not to be there, to be hiding, she says a great deal about us with a frontal lucidity that touches us all. She never blinks, either at the world or at herself.’

INFORMATION
Cindy Sherman’s retrospective at Fondation Louis Vuitton runs until 3 January 2021. fondationlouisvuitton.fr 

ADDRESS

Fondation Louis Vuitton
8 Avenue du Mahatma Gandhi
75116 Paris

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Few 72-year-olds can pull off shoulder-length hair, a fitted white shirt, skinny jeans and trainers. But Jeff Wall does, with aplomb. He looks like a wise old pro in a Jim Jarmusch movie. But, as witnessed in his monumental new works at White Cube Mason’s Yard in London’s St James’s, Wall’s poise in person is matched by the incredible precision of his work.

Wall is, along with Cindy Sherman, Andreas Gursky, and, slightly later, Gregory Crewdson, among the most influential conceptual photographers alive today. He grew up in Vancouver, the son of a doctor and a housewife. His parents were interested in art, and he was encouraged to be creative from an early age. ‘I was able to judge from an early age whether a piece of art was good or not,’ he says. He went through his parents’ book collection, learning about the history of artistry as a child. By his teenage years, Wall was using the local library to take out art books not available at home, and was going to galleries on his own while his friends cavorted around doing the things more typical teenagers do.

He studied history of art at the University of British Columbia, where he fell in with a group of radically experimental artists. Wall took a while to find his voice or his chosen medium, experimenting with painting, performance and various different types of photographic imaging. But a trip to the Prado Museum in Madrid, where he genuflected to the creations of Velázquez and Goya, was significant. He remembers looking at a garishly backlit street advert he saw at a bus stop on his return home from the Prado. Wall decided he would make monumental pictures, as detailed as a Goya tableau, but with the high-production values and photorealist aesthetic of the advertising world.

Wall would soon shake the world of photography like a snow globe. Through his staged images, often painstakingly recreated from memory, or built out from an idea he happened upon, he subverted what photography was supposed to be – the act of using a camera to be a passive observer of unfolding reality, a witness to the world as it happens. His new approach caused something verging on outrage. Yet it also hooked the art world. In 2012, his work Dead Troops Talk – a meticulously staged vision created in 1992 of the moments after an ambush of a Red Army Patrol in Afghanistan – fetched just over $3.3m at Christie’s, New York, making it the third most expensive photograph ever sold at auction.

Today, he’s considered one of the godfathers of what is sometimes called ‘set-up’ photography, in which we are presented with a single image that seems stolen from a far larger, much more multivalent scenario; one unfolding either side of the moment the shutter momentarily closes, and often also happening outside of the frame. Is it real thing he witnessed, or a fiction he conjured, or a mixture of both? Wall isn’t about to provide you with an answer.

The new show at White Cube demonstrates how restlessly Wall has worked ever since. The exhibition’s titular work is Recovery: a photorealist depiction of a young man coming to in a seaside park after, we can only presume, a fall on his bike. The image is based on years of photographs, yet it also returns Wall to the techniques he learnt as a student – that of painting. For the figures surrounding the dazed man are depicted with the ripe, vivid and off-kilter colours you might find in the expressionist movement of Paris in the first decade of the last century. The image is a ‘vision’ says Wall, a reflection of the dazed man’s mental state. But it also feels like something of a homage to the artists that have guided him, while his contemporaries were so preoccupied with exactly that – the contemporary.

Alongside Recovery hangs a triptych titled The Gardens. The three images feature arguing couples in strangely manicured but maze-like landscapes. Look closely and we realise, from one image to the next, the couples are doubles of each other. Then there’s Daybreak (2011), showing Bedouin olive pickers sleeping al fresco in the Israeli scrubland. It’s dawn, and the light is soft. They seem to be on a journey together. The image has a classical, almost Biblical quality – it could be an image from the Renaissance. Yet, on the horizon, we can see a huge secure complex, surrounded in barbed wire and white neon lights. A road leads the olive pickers to it.

It can seem an obvious point, but Wall’s images are huge. Recovery stretches across 4.5m of the gallery’s walls. The Gardens and Daybreak are not much smaller. This undoubtably changes the way we consider the image. A Wall image develops its own centrifugal force, sucking us in. It demands our attention, forces us to try and work out its enigmas. It’s also worth noting that the presence of a triptych is in itself something of a departure for Wall. Most photographers work in series, understanding a single subject by focusing on its many angles and sides. Wall tends to make single images, each its own construct, its own complex scenario. He creates and then presents it, avoiding any hint at his own motivations. Beyond a title, he leaves us to do the detective work.

Wall remains a student of painting, one who ‘still spends a lot of my time in galleries’. ‘If you want to be an artist, why would you not learn about the history of art,’ he says. ‘What else would you do?’ He most points out that many of the great canvas works over the centuries are ‘life-sized’. Why not a photograph? The great painters of the late 19th and early 20th century were, he points out, basically heretics, so revolutionary was their use of colour, their distortion of perspective, the lowliness of their subjects and, in Braque and Picasso’s case, the everyday objects they transformed into high art.

The photographer speaks of looking at Manet while studying at the Courtauld in the early 1970s – ‘I preferred London then,’ he says. He talks of the influence of Matisse and Gauguin and their contemporaries: of how their pursuit of Arcadia, the Greek vision of pastoralism and harmony with nature, is also his own. Wall came of age in an era when photographers spoke of the pictorial as done and disinteresting – a thing of the past. By focusing on the eternal and fertile mysteriousness of the pictorial with forensic finesse, Wall has outdone them all. 

INFORMATION

‘Jeff Wall’, 28 June – 7 September, White Cube Mason’s Yard. whitecube.com

ADDRESS

White Cube
25 – 26 Mason’s Yard
London SW1Y 6BU

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The light-bulb moment for Liz Swig’s latest project came as she viewed the photographs of American artist Catherine Opie at Thomas Dane Gallery in London at the end of 2017. ‘I had always known Cathy’s work to have an old-master quality,’ says Swig. ‘But I distinctly remember standing in front of her oversized oval photographs, thinking how cameo-like they were.’

Swig, who founded Lizworks in 2014 as a platform for creative collaboration with contemporary artists, approached Opie to ask whether she would be interested in working together to reimagine her portraits in another form. Opie was impressed by Swig’s 2016 project Charmed (W*215), a charm bracelet encompassing works by seven leading female artists, and agreed immediately. ‘Charmed was an incredibly beautiful piece and after an initial conversation with Liz, I was sure she would take care of my ideas,’ says Opie. ‘I had been making these portraits that I always felt were a conversation with cameos anyway, especially when I started making the ovals with the black background. I really wanted to make something contemporary in relationship to the cameo, to bring the cameo back.’

Swig has always loved the idea of making the traditional contemporary. It was the guiding principle of Charmed, and with Cameo, as the new project is called, she reinterprets one of the oldest forms of portraiture, dating back to the ancient Mycenaean civilisation, when the profiles of the Gods of Olympus were carved in agate. ‘I set about asking people where to find a carver who could realise the project,’ Swig says. ‘I visited Torre del Greco in Naples, where shell cameos have been produced for centuries, but it wasn’t easy to find someone to produce original designs. In the end I discovered Gino Di Luca, a third-generation cameo maker from one of the oldest family firms.’

As the project progressed, it occurred to Swig to invite Cindy Sherman to collaborate. ‘Cindy is always in my mind,’ she says. ‘She designed one of the pieces for Charmed and I felt much of her work could translate as a cameo.’ Swig was particularly keen on Sherman’s Instagram account. The wildly distorted mock self-portraits, created specifically for the social media platform, have sent the art world into a spin. ‘I love their cartoonish wackiness,’ says Swig.

Luckily, Sherman also likes cameos. ‘Especially the idea of dark, strange ones,’ she says. ‘I also like the idea of tiny objects being art.’ She felt the Lizworks project would be a good use for her Instagram images since the files are not large enough to blow up to a bigger scale. ‘It will be fun to wear one as a piece of art,’ says Sherman.

The Lizworks Cameo collection comprises limited-editions of a pendant (above) and two rings by Sherman; and a set of cufflinks, a brooch, a ring, plus a standalone piece by Opie (top), which can be worn as a pendant if the buyer is so inclined. The pieces are carved in sardonyx shell and set in 18ct pink gold, some bejewelled with precious stones and pearls.

‘I think cameos are not only portraits, but allegories,’ says Opie. ‘I really liked the fact that the carver was going to interpret my work with his hands, and, especially with the piece Self Portrait / Nursing, he was creating a new way to read my body because he was creating something three-dimensional.’

Swig is most excited by the tactile nature of the final pieces and the stories they tell. ‘As with all my projects, I have a sudden feeling that this is right for now,’ she says. ‘I am often asked whether I consider myself to be making jewellery. The truth is I don’t. I am working with celebrated contemporary artists to make limited-edition art pieces that reflect the moment. But I cannot find a true distinction. As long as they sparkle and shine, I know I am doing something right.’ 

As originally featured in the June 2019 issue of Wallpaper* (W*243)

INFORMATION

Cameo was unveiled in Venice on 8 May during the preview days of this year’s Venice Biennale. For more information, visit the Lizworks website

The front gallery at Venice’s Punta della Dogana used to house a double-sabre wielding warrior ferociously perched on the shoulders of a roaring bear. Cast in bronze and encrusted in coral, the sculpture – standing more than 7m high – was a raucous overture to Damien Hirst’s flamboyant solo exhibition, ‘Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable’. Fast forward by one year, a gently shimmering curtain of blood red glass beads by Félix González-Torres stands in its place. On one side, Urs Fischer’s wax statue of a slightly hunchbacked man slowly melts as the candles on his head flicker away. This year’s show, ‘Dancing with Myself’, trades Hirst’s bombast for an altogether more introspective tone, but proves just as alluring as its predecessor.

Named after Billy Idol’s 1980 pop hit, the exhibition explores the ways in which artists have integrated their bodies, images and personas into photography, video and sculpture from the 1970s to the present day – ‘self-representation’, as curators Martin Bethenod (managing director of the Pinault Collection) and Florian Ebner (chief curator of photography at the Centre Pompidou) call it. Self-representation, as Bethenod is careful to point out, is distinct from self-portrait. ‘The artist’s body is not so much the subject of their work as the instrument with which they can approach a number of themes and stances, often political ones dealing with social or racial issues, and questions of identity, gender and sexuality’, he says.

Opening with Fischer and González-Torres (a smaller piece by the latter, tracing the decline of T-cells in the blood of an AIDS’ patient, appears near the curtain), ‘Dancing with Myself’ suggests a sense of intimacy that at a glance, seems at odds with the monumental Tadao Ando-designed venue. But it succeeds in prompting a pensive silence as viewers then ascend the stairs into rooms filled with an impressive roster of modern and contemporary works – the photography of Lee Friedlander, Cindy Sherman and Roni Horn; the videos of Adel Abdessemend and Lili Reynaud-Dewar; and sculptures by Robert Gober, Alina Szapocznikow and Maurizio Cattelan, to name a few.

Being a collaboration between the Pinault Collection and Essen’s Museum Folkwang (where Ebner was chief curator of photography until 2017), ‘Dancing with Myself’ deftly combines works from both institutions. This allows panoramic perspectives on some artist’s careers – Sherman, for example, is represented by film stills from the Folkwang alongside four decades’ worth of photos from the Pinault Collection. But it’s the new dialogues among artists of different generations that leave the strongest impression.

The Folkwang lent a haunting Nan Goldin image, which shows the artist emerging from a toxic relationship with a bloodied eye and bruised face, yet a brave expression. Within the show, this shares a room with photographs from LaToya Ruby Frazier’s The Notion of Family series, from the Pinault Collection. Three decades younger than Goldin, Frazier approaches the camera with the same bracing honesty, but also brings together three generations of immediate and extended family in her hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania, telling a story of defiance, grace and even optimism amid industrial decline and encroaching poverty.

Elsewhere, a trio of Lee Friedlander’s self portraits, documenting a journey through the East Coast in the 1960s joins contemporary photographs by the peripatetic Brazilian Paulo Nazareth. Titled Noticas de America, the series was shot as he made his way through South, and then North America on foot, visiting indigenous peoples and occasionally bearing handwritten signs that speak to their experiences of marginalisation and alienation. ‘Vendo mi imagen de hombre exótico’ (I sell the image of an exotic man), reads one. ‘I am an American also,’ says another, hoisted in front of a line of armoured police in what is ostensibly the United States.

Another room juxtaposes disembodied body parts from a range of authors. Among others, There’s a single leg by Robert Gober, jutting out of a wall with a square patch removed from its black trouser to accommodate an unlit candle; an upside-down video by Bruce Nauman, zoomed in to the artist’s lips as he repeats the title, Lip Sync; close-ups of John Coplans’ palm, buttocks and heel, taken as he approached his eighth decade to challenge the convention of hiding aging bodies; a lamp sculpture by Szapocznikow, with a curious resemblance to puckered lips and an outstretched tongue. Of the latter, Bethenod says, ‘it has a feminine presence that looks sweet and delicate and erotic. But in fact it might be the most violent work, because her body was suffering as she battled with cancer.’

The show is not without its confrontational moments – the works of Gilbert & George occupy a central hall, including a large-scale picture, Blood Tears Spunk Piss, which alternates between microscopic imagery of bodily fluids and the two artists in the nude. In the final gallery is Steve McQueen’s video work, Cold Breath, a cinematic projection of the artist fondling his own nipple for ten minutes straight; an expression of racial and political themes for sure, but fundamentally an erotic statement. And while the exhibition excels in its more cerebral aspects, its raw physicality is also not to be overlooked. 

INFORMATION
‘Dancing with Myself’ is on view until 16 December. For more information, visit the Pinault Collection website

ADDRESS

Punta della Dogana
Campo San Samuele 3231
30124 Venice

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With just nine months to go until the 58th Venice Biennale, the tardiness of Donald Trump’s State Department in announcing the US pavilion artist has not gone unnoticed. In keeping with much of Trump’s presidency, this months-long delay goes against traditions of previous administrations. The last two artists – Mark Bradford in 2017 and Joan Jonas in 2015 – were announced in spring the year before; Sarah Sze’s appointment for the 2013 Venice Biennale was revealed in February 2012.

Unease is brewing in the wake of the State Department’s apparent silence. After all, President Trump has provided endless fodder for artists and magazine art directors alike since winning the presidential election. Given the Trump administration’s astounding bid to pass off his US-Mexico border wall prototypes as land art earlier this year, the Venice Biennale announcement is likely to elicit shock and surprise.

Here are four artists worthy of making their mark on the American pavilion next year...

David Hammons
Even if Hammons were offered the opportunity to represent America at Venice, chances are he would decline, as the notoriously elusive 73-year-old rarely agrees to shows and is famous for making himself scarce. He once even commented in a 1986 interview, ‘I can’t stand art actually. I’ve never, ever liked art.’ Arguably one of America’s greatest living artists, Hammons is a cult figure among other artists, writers, museum curators, gallerists and collectors. With prevailing concerns addressing the experiences of African-American life and the role that race plays in American society, the politically charged gravitas in his work is undeniable. Hammons at Venice in 2019 would be one of the most anticipated exhibitions in the American pavilion to ever be staged. But for an artist who has so successfully shunned the art world and is a step ahead of it at all times, we should either be prepared for a complete let-down, or otherwise brace ourselves to look into the mirror that Hammons holds up to our culture.

Cindy Sherman
Considered to be one of the world’s most influential and important living photographers, Sherman’s practice has remained consistent over the past 40 years, involving taking self-portraits in guises, personas, costumes, make-up and rendering herself unrecognizable. She has produced numerous images that will forever belong in the hallowed halls of art history. The 63-year-old artist recently made her Instagram account public (@cindysherman), and has over 200,000 fans flocking there to pore over her remarkable, innovative selfies. Sherman’s images have changed our understanding of sexual stereotypes, identity and aging in a society obsessed with youth and status, all through the filter of a twisted lens. While many of her portraits that evoke classical paintings would sit perfectly at home in Venice, also note there has never been a solo exhibition of a dedicated photographer in the US pavilion.

Carmen Herrera
Cuban-born and New York-based artist Carmen Herrera, who is 103 years young, still works most days and is in her artistic prime. Hard enough back in the mid-20th century for any female artist to succeed, along with the complicated obstacles of being a Cuban-American, she pursued her craft for over 60 years with little recognition, not gaining wide attention until her 80s. For the past five decades, she’s established a visual language which has been explored with great nuance, fashioning some of the most elegant and severe examples of hard-edge abstract painting. Honoured with a stunning retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2016, the art world finally understood the artist’s significance in the historical canon. Better late than never, and a firm believer that less is more, Herrera is a living treasure and after a lifetime of near-anonymity, her presence over the past decade has been an inspiring and vital gift. The glorious setting of Venice would only amplify her works of unapologetic beauty.

Kara Walker
An artist who explores race, identity, injustice, violence, gender and how America’s original sin of slavery has conditioned all subsequent US history, Walker’s devastating and gut-wrenching show in September 2017 at Sikkema Jenkins & Co in New York stunned audiences and was a critical sensation. In the era of ‘fake news’, her brutal exhibition found that there was plentiful truth still left in art. Walker became famous in the 1990s for large-scale, cut-paper, silhouetted figures and is now amongst the best-known artists of her generation. As her career continues to gather acclaim, and with a practice that is thought-provoking and monumental in its message, her selection for the Venice Biennale in 2019 would be timely.

Follow Vasili Kaliman on Instagram to see the art finds from his travels, and on Twitter where he shares the latest news and developments in the global art market.

INFORMATION

Venice Biennale 2019 runs from 11 May – 24 November. For more information, visit the website

Swedish art dealer Per Skarstedt is a man who likes a project. He’s currently renovating a £17m town house on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and has just opened a new gallery in London’s St James’s. Two years ago, he renovated a beach house in the Hamptons as a holiday home for his wife and two sons, and he’s still tinkering with his London pad in Albany, Piccadilly, that was officially finished in 2014. 

Aside from acquiring blue chip addresses in London and New York, where he has galleries in Chelsea and on Madison Avenue, he’s been amassing art in large quantities. He bought his first piece, by Cindy Sherman, in 1987 when he was 23 and still living in Borås, the small town in Sweden where he was born.

A year later, he met Sherman, along with Martin Kippenberger, and he has been collecting both, along with Richard Prince, for almost 30 years. Specialising only in European and American art from the 1980s onwards, Skarstedt now also represents 30 artists, all of whom have become famous and many of whom he counts as friends. 

The loyalty Skarstedt displays to his artists also extends to his architects. Annabelle Selldorf takes care of his operations Stateside. She designed his Hamptons retreat, the Chelsea gallery and is renovating his 10,000 sq ft Manhattan home with interior designer Jacques Grange. In London, architect Thomas Croft looks after Skarstedt’s spaces. He designed his former London gallery, on Old Bond Street, opened in 2012; Skarstedt’s Georgian gentleman’s pad in Albany (neighbours include French art collector Jean Pigozzi and design dealer David Gill); and the new gallery in St James’s.  

‘Per started as a dealer and collector and comes from a position of buying art for himself. He’s interested in how art sits in interiors, how the two work together, what makes a successful backdrop,’ says Croft, as he weaves past removal men delivering elegant Danish furniture into the new gallery’s offices. (In 1990, Skarstedt also started buying Scandinavian midcentury furniture and he now has more than 200 pieces from the likes of Finn Juhl, Hans Wegner and Axel Salto.)

Skarstedt met Croft through artist George Condo, and Croft was already well versed in gallery design, having created spaces for Timothy Taylor, David Gill and Simon Lee. ‘Some projects require you to step forward with a proposal,’ says Croft, ‘but with gallery spaces it’s almost the opposite; you edit the space, as the art provides the layering.’

Stretching to 5,000 sq ft across two floors, the gallery offers three interconnected rooms with large white walls. It’s Skarstedt’s biggest venture yet. ‘My aim was to create an elegant space that was a reflection of our Upper East Side gallery,’ he explains. ‘The latter is located in a historic townhouse which was formerly the Rosenberg Gallery where Picasso and Braque were first shown in New York.’ The 1930s London space, formerly the home of the Portland Gallery, may not have such a rich pedigree, but it’s grand nonetheless, with a vast front door flanked by stone obelisks and arched windows. 

Bona Montagu, Skarstedt’s business partner and director since 2012, runs the new gallery. ‘It affords us the ability to curate more comprehensive historical exhibitions while providing a platform for our primary programme,’ she explains. She also knows St James’s inside out, having worked for Simon Dickinson gallery for 17 years, and prefers its Old Masters feel to the retail-y atmosphere around Savile Row. The nature of the area, combined with the distinctly non-white-cube feel of the gallery, ‘partly informed’ the inaugural show, ‘Cindy Sherman and David Salle: History Portraits and Tapestry Paintings’. On show are six paintings by Salle and eight photographs by Sherman, all created between 1988 and 1991.   

When Skarstedt moves into his new Manhattan home, he will be neighbours with Larry Gagosian. Although both are mega-dealers, they are not rivals. ‘Per’s not a normal dealer,’ says Croft. ‘He works with very established artists, looks at their whole oeuvre and selects what he thinks is a key period. It’s a secondary-market approach with primary artists.’ He can reinvigorate an artist’s career, shape their legacy and move the market in terms of prices. 

Croft, too, is something of a small-scale art collector, having grown up with heirlooms from his once-wealthy ancestors (they founded Croft Port in 1588 and all was well until Uncle Percy took charge in the 1930s). His skill in pairing Robert Venturi chairs with 18th-century family portraits in his own home extends to creating contemporary spaces in historical buildings, and new spaces with classical touches. ‘Occasionally gallerists have offered to pay me in artworks,’ muses Croft, recalling how Timothy Taylor offered him some Richard Hamiltons, Thomas Dane some Damien Hirst Butterfly paintings, ‘but I was always too poor to accept’. 

Now, though, with commissions for high-end homes and country estates rolling in, and three new houses on the Howard de Walden Estate in central London under construction, Croft could easily accept canvases instead of cash. ‘But I’m sad to say that with Per I’m off the price list. He doesn’t have a painting cheap enough!’

Angela Choon, senior partner at David Zwirner, has known Skarstedt since the early 1990s, when they all started out in New York together. ‘Right from the get-go, Per made very personal purchases that were focused and specialist,’ she recalls. ‘His niche approach has created a really strong, specific market that complements ours. At this point in time, his artists are almost classic.’  

‘Per likes the layering of history in his spaces, and galleries need character,’ says Croft. ‘It’s important for every art space because the works just look weird in a blank white room.’ Complementing the softly spoken Swede on his consistency of character, Croft adds, ‘He also enjoys long-term collaborations with people’. 

His loyalty has paid off. As Choon says: ‘Per knew exactly what he wanted to do and he picked the right artists to do it with.’

As originally featured in the November 2016 issue of Wallpaper* (W*212)

INFORMATION

‘Cindy Sherman and David Salle: History Portraits and Tapestry Paintings’, is on view until 26 November. For more information, visit the Skarstedt website and the Thomas Croft website

ADDRESS

Skarstedt
8 Bennet Street
London, SW1A 1RP

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Over the course of history, the visual world has hardly been kind to women. In the 1980s, when Cindy Sherman, a young photographer from New York, was making a name with her self-staged portraits of female stereotypes from pop culture, she was, in part, reacting to widespread conservatism in the West. In the present day, where images have an even greater presence in our lives (it’s now thought that we collectively produce more than three trillion a year) Sherman’s postmodern protest is hardly less piquant.

Interestingly, in the first major survey of Sherman’s work in Los Angeles in nearly two decades, The Broad's guest curator Philipp Kaiser has chosen not to focus on the trendy topics raised by Sherman’s performed photographs, such as intersectional feminism and self-representation. Instead, he has tapped into more local connections in Sherman’s work: her engagement with film both as a source and as a medium, from her iconic Untitled Film Stills series and her 1997 feature film Office Killer, to her lesser-known rear projection series, inspired by late 1950s and 60s cinema.

Also among the 120 works going up – drawn primarily from the Broad's collection, the largest holding of Sherman’s work in the world – are a number of vastly influential series created in the period 1977–2003, including works from Sex Pictures, 1992, and her centrefold images.

So what new information can the viewer glean from this expansive survey of a 40 year career? The artist might always be present in her work, but she remains a perennial mystery. As she told The Guardian in a rare interview in 2011, ‘I'm not about revealing myself.’ When it comes to Sherman’s photographs, the question is always turned back on the person who’s looking.

INFORMATION

’Cindy Sherman: Imitation of Life’ is on view from 11 June – 2 October. For more information, visit The Broad’s website

Photography courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures

ADDRESS

The Broad
221 S. Grand Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90012

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Total transformation was the mandate given to 1100 Architect, the New York and Frankfurt-based firm who oversaw the renovation of Metro Pictures in Chelsea. The space recently reopened with Cindy Sherman's first solo show at the New York gallery since 2012, which features the American artist, now 62, assuming the role of women of a certain age in the 1920s, when they were defined by ‘exaggerated makeup, modern clothing and seductive poses in 1920s Hollywood publicity photos’. The images are printed directly onto sheets of metal using dye-sublimation technology, thereby eliminating the need for a protective layer of glass. Physically and conceptually vulnerable, the work is refreshingly open, just like new the new space.  

But this wasn't always the case. When Metro Pictures founders Janelle Reiring and Helene Winer moved from SoHo and bought their building on West 24th Street with Barbara Gladstone and Matthew Marks 20 years ago, the firm cut their space up into three smaller galleries, forming an intimate narrative sequence for all their shows. 

‘Back then, those rooms which of late have felt a little modest, seemed grand, actually. There was also more of a distinction at the time between the gallery experience and the museum experience,’ says David Piscuskas, the partner at 1100 Architect who oversaw the new renovation. ‘This time we all knew we wanted clean human proportions, but on a bigger scale. The idea was to bring in natural light and think differently about how to connect the main level with the second floor.’

After a three-month hiatus, the result is a more usable gallery divided among two rooms instead of three, with a more dramatic presentation from the street (there is no longer a vestibule). They also replaced the old steel staircase with a more discreet aluminum and Corian version. 

‘In the early days it was more important to try and get people to go upstairs, so they knew there was something going on in the upper level. Now, the stair is not on view at all; it starts and ends in the same play but you find it through a little divide in the wall. So you get a much more compact contour of switchbacks that takes you upstairs in an intimate way, as opposed to the grand industrial gesture we had done 20 years ago,’ says Piscuskas, noting that the changes in the space mimic the changes in scale and presentation with art then and now. Without enlarging the footprint, they also opened up former storage area at the north end to gain 16 percent more exhibition space and install a skylight. 

Visitors now access each of the two primary spaces from a central entrance. Aside from the original floor, it's a new twist on the white cube that is ‘totally devoid of detail’, says Piscuskas, adding, ‘This feels right for now.’

INFORMATION

’Cindy Sherman’ is on view until 11 June. For more details, visit Metro Pictures’ website

Photography: Genevieve Hanson. Courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures

ADDRESS

Metro Pictures
519 West 24th Street
New York, NY 10011

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New York’s 1980’s art world, then chock a block with Warhol’s infamous Factory, along with regular sightings of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Cindy Sherman on the prowl, is now somewhat clouded by today’s hipster galleries that dominate Chelsea. Yet that particular chapter in history can be relived in all its glory via the photographer Jeanette Montgomery Barron’s scrapbook-like tome, My Years in the 1980s New York Art Scene, which is packed with her snaps, shot in the studios of Andy Warhol, Keith Haring and other now notable artists, as well as gallery posters and Village Voice reviews.

'I was fortunate to be in the center of it all,' says Barron who now resides in Kent, Connecticut, where her husband heads up James Barron Art.  At the tender age of 24, Barron was introduced by the prominent Zurich dealer Bruno Bischofberger to a wide range of artists in the Big Apple. From there, armed with her Hassleblad much like Robert Mapplethorpe, she captured the lower Manhattan art scene. In between hitting gallery openings and countless dinner parties, Barron also modeled for both painter Alex Katz and fashion photographer David Seidner. Both of their works are included in her latest book.

Despite the intimate photo-documentation of Andy Warhol’s tête à têtes with Jean-Michel Basquiat, and captures of David Salle and others in their studios, Barron is far from just a social photographer. Not only have more than 30 of her images been acquired by the Max Mara private museum Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia, her work is also included in the permanent collections of Houston Museum of Fine Arts and the Andy Warhol Museum.

INFORMATION

’My Years in the 1980s New York Art Scene’ is published by Collezione Maramotti and Silvana Editoriale. Available at Amazon and Glenn Horowitz Bookseller

ADDRESS

Glenn Horowitz Bookseller
17 West 54th Street
New York, NY 

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Cindy Sherman is the conceptual portrait photographer with herself as sole subject, lauded by Billy Bragg in Cindy of a Thousand Lives. At once photographer, model, make-up artist, hairdresser, stylist and wardrobe mistress, she’s also a dab hand with a ball of potato and flour. ‘This step is more complicated to explain than it is to execute,’ she warns when describing how to use a floured fork to make her gnocchi crescent-shaped and ridged – the better to catch extra sauce. Her images of film-noir starlets, porn models, hitchhikers, clowns, socialites and Old Master milkmaids all require viewing rather than explaining. They can be funny and grotesque, disturbing and nostalgic – and frequently sunburned.

Ingredients
Serves 4
1.5lb potatoes, preferably organic (not Idaho potatoes or new potatoes)
1 cup all-purpose flour
⅔ cup freshly grated Parmesan
(For the sauce)
1 tbs butter
minced shallot
½ tsp freshly chopped sage

Method
Boil the potatoes, unpeeled, in abundant water. Do not test too often by puncturing them with a fork or they will become waterlogged. When cooked, drain and peel as soon as you can handle them. Purée through a food mill or potato ricer while still warm.

Add most of the flour to the mashed potatoes and knead into a smooth mixture. Stop adding flour when the mixture is soft, smooth and still slightly sticky. If you add too much flour and knead it too long, the gnocchi will be tough; too little and the dough will be hard to work with.

Let the dough rest for a few minutes, covered (I use an upside-down bowl). Working in batches, shape into sausage-like rolls about as thick as your thumb, then cut the rolls into ¾in lengths. I usually then roll each piece slightly to form a ball.

Take a fork with long, rounded slim prongs. Working over a counter, hold the fork sideways, with the prongs pointing from left to right (or right to left) and with the concave side facing you. With the other hand, place a dumpling on the inside curve of the fork just below the points of the prongs and press it against the prongs with the tip of the index finger pointing directly at and perpendicular to the fork. While pressing the dumpling with your finger, flip it away from the prong tips and toward the handle of the fork so that you’re slowly and gently rolling over the tines. It helps if the tines are floured.

As it rolls to the base of the prongs, let it drop to the counter. The dumpling will then be somewhat crescent-shaped, with ridges on one side formed by your fingertip. This is not just a capricious decorative exercise. It serves to thin out the middle section of the dumpling so that it will cook more evenly, and to create the little grooved traps in its surface for the sauce to sink into and make the gnocchi tastier.

After making about 4-6 of these, I roll them in a bowl of semolina flour to coat, and lay each batch on a cloth to rest until I’m done with them all. Melt the butter in a medium-sized skillet. Sauté the shallots for 2 minutes, then add the sage. Drop the gnocchi (as many portions as you like so long as they’re not crowded) into 4 quarts or more of boiling salted water. In a very short time they will float to the surface. Let them cook just 8-10 seconds more, then lift out with a slotted spoon and transfer to the skillet. Toss with the sauce, then put in bowls. Grate over some Parmesan, and grind a little pepper on the top. Serve hot.

INFORMATION

Photography: John Short. Interiors: Maria Sobrino: Food: Nicolas Ghirlando