Cindy Sherman / Annette Messager / George Kuchar — L'Envers des Choses, Centre Georges Pompidou, 1993

Exhibition booklet published by the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, for L'Envers des Choses, a five-week group exhibition curated by Catherine Grenier, 8 September–11 October 1993. Collection Traces, no. 4. Softcover, 16 × 19.5 cm, [24] unnumbered pages. Colour and black-and-white illustrations. Text in French. ISBN 2-85850-760-0.

The title names the reverse, underside or wrong side of things. Three artists who did not obviously belong in the same room were placed there: Annette Messager's Les Piques and Les Masques, which cut, pin and recombine bodies and images; Cindy Sherman's seven works from the 1992 Sex Pictures, replacing her familiar performed identities with prostheses, dolls and mannequin fragments; and George Kuchar's bodily comedy—low-budget melodrama, domestic embarrassment and nakedness filmed with the grandeur of a studio production and approximately none of its resources. Photography, installation and underground cinema met around the same unstable body.

With hindsight, Kuchar is the catalogue's sharpest curatorial move. Sherman may now be its most immediately recognisable name, but the Pompidou gave the cover to a still from Kuchar's Knocturne (1968). The cult filmmaker becomes the visual entrance to the exhibition, scrambling the hierarchy between museum photography, sculptural installation and proudly disreputable cinema. The accompanying programme included a discussion on contemporary art and psychoanalysis. The institution knew what it had assembled.

The booklet is less a conventional three-artist survey than a compact record of a particular 1993 proposition: an image can disclose something precisely by refusing to present itself whole.

Condition: Fair. A pronounced, near-geometric sun mark and tonal fading across the pale pink-grey wrappers, alongside handling and edge wear, small nicks and a barcode label to the rear. The fading is substantial and clearly visible, but has acquired a severe elegance of its own—an accidental second layer of graphic design laid over the original cover. The series was called Collection Traces. This copy has not escaped the title.

Uncommon on the market: at the time of cataloguing, we could not locate another copy offered for sale online.