Cindy Sherman

Born in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, in 1954, Cindy Sherman rose to prominence as one of the leading artists of the Pictures Generation — a group that also included Richard Prince, Sherrie Levine, Louise Lawler and Robert Longo — in the 1970s. Over her five-decade-long career, Sherman has produced iconic photographic self-portraits that examine the nature of contemporary image production. Appropriating stereotypes presented by a barrage of mass media — from advertising, television and magazines to cinema — her artworks explore identity, gender and art as visual and performed constructs. 

Sherman attended the State University College at Buffalo and moved to Manhattan at the age of 23 in 1977. There, she swiftly achieved widespread recognition for her seminal series of Untitled Film Stills, a suite of 69 black and white photographs taken between 1977 and 1980 in which she contrived and roleplayed various female characters. Disguised with costumes, wigs, makeup and props, she explored cinematic tropes from 1950s and 1960s Hollywood, film noir, and European art-house films: the American housewife, working career-girl, femme fatale, heroine and damsel in distress. ‘I suppose unconsciously, or semiconsciously at best,’ she said. ‘I was wrestling with some sort of turmoil of my own about understanding women… I definitely felt that the characters are questioning something — perhaps being forced into a certain role.’ 

Performing as both model and photographer of her images, Sherman hijacks the traditions of female subjectivity that underlie art history. Such strategies connected her to influential postmodernist theorists such as Laura Mulvey, the feminist film critic who coined the term ‘male gaze’ in 1975 to describe the way in which women, at the mercy of the camera lens, are transformed into objects of desire.  

In the 1980s, Sherman transitioned to colour photography and larger formats. Turning away from glamour and celebrity and towards the visceral and grotesque, she has since produced acclaimed series such as The Centrefolds (1981) — Untitled #96 sold for US$3,890,500 at Christie’s in New York in 2011 — Disasters (1986–89), History Portraits (1989–90), Sex Pictures (1992) and Clowns (2003).  

Sherman’s tenacious enquiry into the ways and politics of looking has secured her position as one of the 20th century’s most significant image-makers. Her work is held prestigious collections worldwide, such as the Tate in London, the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Boston and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.