‘I thought I knew myself well enough to create my own living space, but I quickly realised how incredibly time-consuming it is.’ So Cindy Sherman told AD France in 2013 when the magazine featured her appropriately chic-yet-quirky apartment on Rue de Grenelle in Paris. The solution to the artist’s problem had been provided by that now ubiquitous museum face-lifter, the architect Annabelle Selldorf, who put Sherman in touch with the interior design duo Luis Laplace and Christophe Comoy. Cue the installation of a blood-red curved Italian sofa and mustard-coloured armchairs from the 1960s, curtains in electric-yellow waxed cotton from West Africa, and strange, plant-like ceramics by the American sculptor Chris Garofalo. These items and more from the apartment are being auctioned off – Sherman is bidding her pied-à-terre au revoir – by Piasa on 2 October.
If Sherman felt disinclined to decorate her apartment herself, Rakewell can easily understand why. For decades the artist has been occupied making mises en scène for the witty photographs she takes of herself in various guises. In a profile Apollo ran in 2019, the interviewer found the artist’s studio packed with wigs, props, costumes and prosthetic body parts as well as bric-a-brac that included a pair of miniature crowns picked up at the Paris flea market. ‘I don’t know what I’m going to use them for,’ Sherman explained, ‘but it seemed like they had the potential for something. I love weird stuff; a good, weird flea market anywhere is really my favourite place to be.’ The difference between your correspondent and Sherman having a good browse, then, is that Sherman feathers not her nest but her studio, and turns her finds into art.
While a special-edition Leica issued by Gagosian in 2013 is among the lots up for auction – did Sherman ever use it? – surely the most covetable item is the Louis Vuitton studio trunk Sherman designed in 2014 for the fashion house’s 160th anniversary. Interior drawers were made to contain accessories for the artist’s physical transformations – ‘fake eyelashes’, ‘clown wigs’, ‘fake noses’, etc. Meanwhile, travel stickers on the signature brown exterior incorporate Sherman’s ‘self-portraits’ – images from her Clowns series (2003) featuring prominently. ‘Time is a circus, always packing up and moving away,’ said the Hollywood screenwriter Ben Hecht in the 1950s. For Sherman in Paris, that seems about right.
