Morris Louis. Beth Samach, 1958; installation view; Sprüth Magers London. Photo: Steve Ruiz.

In From Wings to Fins, these tensions are more subtle still, working between legacies embedded in objects. Culled from an unspecified collection, the two Morris Louis paintings, Beth Samach (1958) and Gamma (1960), play multiple roles: They are asked to represent the ideals and aspirations of a historical moment of great confidence and aspiration, and to model the falling motion of collapsing buildings in their blooming color drags. In the main space, the wide Beth Samach hangs before two vitrines in which National Geographic magazines are arranged, each with pages curved back in floral loops. Nearby, mounted to the gallery wall, a replica of an architectural security device mimics these radial shapes. The work is titled Fence (After Owen Luder) (2013) and, like the beautifully encased magazines, this archaeological original—discovered among the wreckage of Owen Luder’s Trinity Square car park in Gateshead—has undergone an artistic transmutation, now recast in bronze.

In a second room, Louis’ portrait-scale Gamma shares a corner with Gaillard’s Gates BSC (2013), a rubbing of two manhole covers from Baltimore, Maryland. According to the gallery, Gaillard produced the work while touring Louis’ hometown, memorializing the civic architecture while tracing his kinship with the painter. Upstairs, another National Geographic vitrine shares the space with a heavily matted Polaroid of a second architectural defense, shown fixed into its original fitting beside a concrete staircase. Next to this, an antique telescope points out of the gallery’s window, aiming at a bottle of Captain Cook white rum on a nearby roof. This last piece, Untitled (Captain Cook in the Distance) (2013) is perhaps the exhibition’s most opaque, though the first hint of the artist’s humor, which is otherwise absent in From Wings to Fins.

While billed as a group show, calling From Wings to Fins a two-man exhibition is a bit of a stretch. Louis’ work exists at the exhibition entirely at Gaillard’s pleasure, culled from the annals of modernism to function within Gaillard’s conceptual scheme. While the move is less radical than routine (by now we’ve all seen paintings brought in to function as artifacts, arranged in concert with other art or art-like objects), it effectively releases Louis’ work from its unimaginative role as illustration for Clement Greenberg, opening the work for new meanings. And one has to envy the compositional possibilities available to the blue-chip Gaillard, who can so swiftly select chunks of physical modernist canon.

From Wings to Fins will be on view at Sprüth Magers in London until November 16, 2013.

In her latest solo exhibition at Sprüth Magers in London, Cindy Sherman seems to be attempting the latter.

Cindy Sherman, Untitled, 2010. Installation view, Sprüth Magers London, January 2011. Photograph: Stephen White. Image courtesy of Sprüth Magers Berlin London.

While Sherman is still photographing herself in a range of various guises, she has decidedly broken free of the frames that constrict her former work and has blown up photographs of an eclectic cast of characters to create a larger than life sized tableaux that extends throughout the two spaces of the gallery.

Cindy Sherman, Untitled, 2010. Installation view, Sprüth Magers London, January 2011. Photograph: Stephen White. Image courtesy of Sprüth Magers Berlin London.

The murals plaster the rooms like wallpaper, an effect furthered by the illustrative black and white backdrop, reminiscent of a Victorian woodlands as interpreted through home decor. And inhabiting the space is a strange and unnerving troupe that are very difficult to define…

Cindy Sherman, Untitled, 2010. Pigment print on Phototex adhesive fabric. Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist and Sprüth Magers Berlin London.

Sherman’s work often depicts recognizable stereotypes: the stars of her famous ‘Untitled Film Stills,’ the Renaissance figures and clowns that followed and most recently in her 2008 series, the aging American socialite. However, we have also witnessed disconcerting and gruesome images, particularly in the Fairy Tales and Disasters series of the 1980s.

The figures we see at Sprüth Magers are neither familiar nor horrific; they are simply bizarre. Banished to a colorless forest, these poorly-dressed characters from folklore, fairytales and literature, appear as a cast of rejects. Too strange to be of use. Or perhaps, not strange enough.

Cindy Sherman, Untitled, 2010. Pigment print on Phototex adhesive fabric. Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist and Sprüth Magers Berlin London.

On one wall there is the woman in a peasant-like floral dress, covered in a sheer boudoir wrap with a visible broken foot. An amalgamation of styles that makes you unable to place her in any particular time and place. Next to her stands a figure in an slumpy naked suit, feet in wool socks and brandishing a plastic sword. In the next room a knight in a tunic too big, paired with metallic zebra print trousers and a circus juggler in a dated costume and decidedly twenty-first century sneakers.

Cindy Sherman, Untitled, 2010. Pigment print on Phototex adhesive fabric. Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist and Sprüth Magers Berlin London.

The figures do not sit in their setting, but are rather float on top of it, as if cut and pasted into this strange place. Perhaps it is this quality, this sense of flatness and dislocation, that recalls a favorite Sherman work, the 1975 animation Doll Clothes. However instead of a miniature Cindy we have giant figures, far too big for the space, that stare directly out over us, expressionless.

The heavy makeup that characterizes Sherman’s transformation of herself is gone – replaced instead with subtle digital manipulations used to contort her face. Topical alterations are replaced with structural ones – in the way that plastic surgery has become the preferred method over cosmetics to achieving the desired ‘natural‘ look.

Sherman’s work is undeniably iconic. As one of the most successful artists of the past decades there is an immense amount of pressure to continually produce something new. As these figures break out of their frames inhabiting the entire space and spilling out into the street through the Sprüth Magers window, Sherman attempts to break down her own formula – or at least bend it ever so slightly. For not abiding by the tried and true, Cindy – I applaud you, even if it is not my favorite work – I think I prefer vomit and vacuousness over vagueness.