In her solo exhibition “Orlando Tussaud,” Agnes Scherer references the playful shift of historical personae that occurs both in a Virginia Woolf novel and the museum franchise specializing in wax copies of celebrity figures. From the so-called didactic operetta performance work The Teacher, 2019, in which paintings served as the backdrop for a hysterical puppet show, to the sculptural series of guillotined French Revolution–era monarchs exhibited earlier this year at Horse and Pony, Scherer’s work has a conspicuous theatricality running throughout.

In this exhibition, constructed walls obscure paintings of dandy-like figures, viewable only through pinholes puncturing the paper walls. Peering through one, you see All Nighter, 2019, though it eventually becomes apparent that the image of a figure at work on a laptop flanked by purple theater stage curtains is in fact a mirrored reflection of a painting placed directly behind the wall in front of you. The staged obscuring recalls Merlin Carpenter’s paywalled “Heroes” exhibition (one had to pay an Eintritt of five-thousand euros) at MD72 in 2011, or Marcel Duchamp’s tableau Étant donnés. Here, Scherer’s constructed rooms impose on the space’s Naumanesque walkways, formulating a labyrinth through the gallery that eventually leads to the rear office space, where two mannequins depicting the gallerist and artist stand convened in a meeting. Like Madame Tussaud’s waxwork figures, Scherer’s work plays with how the public imaginary is enacted through representation in the media landscape, recalling Walter Lippmann’s quip that stereotypes are a way for us to quiet the dissonance between “the world outside and the pictures inside our heads.”

— Steven Warwick