A 'TIME AFTER TIME' SHOE ASSEMBLAGE MOBILE MADE BY CYNDI LAUPER 2026

A 'TIME AFTER TIME' SHOE ASSEMBLAGE MOBILE MADE BY CYNDI LAUPER
2026
A pair of pumps hand-painted white, the interiors lined with glazed photographs of the sky and clouds, and the soles with handwritten lyrics to 'Time After Time' and signed C Lauper, hung with twisted, white painted wire and hardware.
overall height 41in; width 9 1/4in; depth 5in
Footnotes:
Cyndi Lauper has long regarded shoes as a site of artistic and personal expression, a practice that dates to her college years. For the celebrated photograph accompanying her 1983 album She's So Unusual, Lauper famously decorated a pair of shoes with imagery from Vincent van Gogh's 'The Starry Night,' now housed in the Smithsonian collection.

Lauper once reflected in an article by Leila Brillson for Refinery29: '...the soles of people's shoes...the fact that it's called the sole. Or the fact that sometimes, in your imagination, you could look through the bottom of the sole of your shoes, to see where that person was going or where they came from, or what they were thinking, or about their life.'

The present work extends this longstanding meditation on shoes, movement, and the traces of human experience. A striking assemblage, it incorporates images of clouds photographed by Lauper herself, suspended in an arrangement that evokes a pair of shoes in motion, as though walking through an imagined landscape. The soles are inscribed with lyrics from the song 'Time After Time,' transforming the footwear into both visual and textual vessels. The words contemplate the paradoxes of intimacy and separation: the sensation of remaining emotionally connected even as two people move in different directions, evoking the bittersweet uncertainty inherent in all relationships:

'I'm walking to [sic] far ahead
you're calling to me I can't
hear what you say
Then you say go slow
I fall behind'

Here, Lauper's characteristic fusion of popular culture, personal symbolism, and visual invention gives material form to the experience of moving forward while remaining, in some sense, tethered to another. The shoes become metaphors for both departure and connection: objects that carry the imprint of where one has been while suggesting the unknowable path ahead.
This lot is subject to the following lot symbols: ¤
¤ Unless indicated by the ¤ symbol next to the lot number (or bearing an explicit statement such as 'No Reserve' or 'Without Reserve'), which denotes no reserve, all lots in the catalog are subject to a reserve. The reserve is the minimum hammer price that the seller is willing to accept for a lot. This amount is confidential and does not exceed the low estimate value.
For further information on this lot please visit Bonhams.com