Agnes Scherer’s Puppets and Their Controlling Masters

Undergirding ‘Woe and Awe’, Agnes Scherer’s first solo show at Sadie Coles HQ, is an unfailing devotion to spectacle. Replete with angelic tales of genesis, whimsical puppets and their overzealous masters, the exhibition relishes in the panache of performance while also gesturing towards the often-hidden institutional mechanisms that determine who is allowed to produce art and how. 

In the multimedia installation tbc (all works 2024), a mammoth folio spreads its cardboard pages before us. Its sequence of surrealist dioramas is periodically activated during programmed performances. When I visited, delicate scenes of carnival joy leapt into life: a ferris wheel, white-water rapid rides and a lone mechanical bull rider. According to the exhibition text, this landscape aims to showcase capitalism’s exploitative ‘transformation from industrial to emotional labour’. The implication is that artistic production is no longer solely inspired by creativity and curiosity; rather, having been adversely impacted by increased demand, it’s become a mechanised, for-profit endeavour. Scherer playfully distorts the traditional pop-up book design. Her fables, laced with ambiguity, include three celestial figures suspended from the ceiling above the folio. Do they herald annunciation or damnation? Their sharp, geometric bodies – restless in their contorted physicality – loom, omen-like over the scene. 

Attuned to Scherer’s kinetic artwork, unnerving melodies reverberate within the spacious gallery walls, haunting the exhibition. Tobias Textor, Scherer’s long-term collaborator, devised the show’s eponymous soundtrack. Automated strings tug at cymbals and bells ring incessantly as flutes echo in the distance. The music creates a sense of sonic dissonance, its mechanical play of overlapping sounds mimicking industrial processes and highlighting the motivations behind the performance.

Upstairs, seven paintings feature green, maroon and cobalt hues, evoking a magical sense of twilight. Golden fireworks erupt. Anthropomorphic, clown-coded puppets perform dutifully yet without joy. Slowly and tentatively, the puppeteers creep in at the margins. In Big bang with bailiff (Seizure of property) and Beached whale with bailiff (Seizure of property), for instance, the masters’ faces are encased in metal headcollars, complete with pearl ornaments which lightly rest on their cheekbones like gilded tears; their mouths and hands are tied to metal rods which move the puppets at the centre of the composition. United in their focus, the puppeteers are too consumed by work to meet our gaze. For whom are they making this intense effort? It’s certainly not for the couple making out in the backseat of a convertible (The special torch) or the well-dressed, martini-sipping public enamoured with the fireworks (The grand scaffold). It falls to the gallery-goers to acknowledge the puppeteers’ labour. At first, Scherer’s show seems to tell a cautionary tale about people entirely absorbed by their creative work. However, she also nods to the institutional forces at play, which exert subtle pressure to comply with the demands of the market.

Scherer captures the contemporary anxiety over artistic labour exploitation in a stark colour palette and a captivating cast of other-worldly characters. At times, however, her aesthetically rich compositions can detract from the work’s criticality – an issue exacerbated by the fact that she is exhibiting in the very institutions she intends to question. The show invites spectators to take a closer look at the foundational ambiguities of the creative sector. Interweaving the weight of woe with the lightness of joy, the works exude a sense of whimsy and wonder. I found myself obsessively yearning for a final peek behind the curtain of Scherer’s vividly complex world.

Agnes Scherer’s ‘Woe and Awe’ is at Sadie Coles, 1 Davies Street W1, until 17 August 

^{Main image: Agnes Scherer, Beached whale with bailiff (Seizure of property) (detail), 2024, acrylic on canvas, 1.3 × 1.4 m. Courtesy: the artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London; photograph: Katie Morrison}