Cindy Sherman

Born in 1954 in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, Cindy Sherman is counted among the most influential artists of the last half-century. Upon graduating from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1976, Sherman relocated to New York City where she began making the seminal Untitled Film Stills. She has gone on to photograph and cast herself in various roles through her masterful use of costume, setting and pose. A retrospective of Sherman’s work is currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue, the exhibition will travel to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis and the Dallas Museum of Art. A selective exhibition organized by the Moderna Museet, Stockholm and the Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo will open in 2013 before traveling to other European venues. Also in February, Hatje Cantz, in cooperation with the Sammlung Verbund Vienna, published a catalogue raisonne of formative early works produced by Sherman between 1975 and 1977.

Cindy Sherman has had one-person exhibitions at institutions that include: Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin (2007); Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen (2007); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2006/07)); Jeu de Paume, Paris (2006); Kestnergesellschaft, Hanover, Germany (2004); Serpentine Gallery, London (2003); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1997); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1997); Museum of Modern Art, New York (1997); Museum Boijmans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam (1996); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid (1996); and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1987). Sherman has most recently participated in major group shows and biennials such as: ILLUMInations, 54th Venice Biennale (2011); 10,000 Lives, Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2010); Skin Fruit: Selections from the Dakis Joannou Collection, New Museum, New York (2010); Mapping the Studio: Artists from the Francois Pinault Collection, Punta della Dogana, Venice (2009/10); and The Pictures Generation: 1974-1984, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2009).

“Cindy Sherman’s works are photographs. She is not a photographer but an artist who uses photography. Each image is built around a photographic depiction of a woman. And each of the women is Sherman herself, simultaneously artist and model, transformed, chameleon-like into a glossary of pose, gesture, and facial expression. As her work developed, between 1977 and 1987, a strange process of metamorphosis took place. Apparently easy and accessible postmodern pastiche underwent a gradual transformation into difficult, but still accessible images that raise serious and challenging questions for contemporary feminist aesthetics. And the metamorphosis provides a new perspective that then alters, with hindsight, the significance of her early work. In order to work through the critical implications of this altered perspective, it is necessary to fly in the face of her own expressly non-theoretical, even anti-theoretical stance. Paradoxically, it is because there is no explicit citation of theory in the work, no explanatory words, no linguistic signposts, that theory can then come into its own. Sherman’s work stays on the side of enigma, but as a critical challenge, not an insoluble mystery. Figuring out the enigma, deciphering its pictographic clues, applying the theoretical tools associated with feminist aesthetics, is, to use one of her favorite words, fun, and draws attention to the way that through feminist aesthetics, theory, decipherment, and the entertainment of riddle or puzzle solving may be connected.”

-Excerpt from “Cosmetics and Abjection: Cindy Sherman 1977-87” by Laura Mulvey. October Files, Cindy Sherman, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England. 2006. Pp 64-5.