Cindy Sherman

In this photographic series, Sherman mimics the cultural roles of women by disguising herself in stereotypically "feminine" roles: suburban gardener, sex object, urban shopper, career girl, housewife. 

Originally commissioned by Artforum magazine, these send-ups of men’s erotic magazines are the antitheses of conventional centerfolds.

In 1983 Sherman produced a series of fourteen photographs initiated by an Interview magazine advertising campaign for the clothing store Dianne B.

In 1985, Sherman was commissioned by Vanity Fair magazine to illustrate fairy tales. 

She read Aesop’s fables, the Brothers Grimm, and various folktales in preparation, seeking out the most grotesque narratives, underscoring Sherman’s preoccupation with horror and the abject.

Sherman’s Sex Pictures series from 1992 is her most controversial project to-date. Eliminating herself once again from the picture frame, she arranged mannequins bought from medical-supply catalogues into pseudo-pornographic tableaus.

In this series, Sherman presents extreme close-ups of faces, masks, and faces behind masks. She uses mannequin heads as well as her own face with highly theatrical make-up and intensely saturated color to create images recalling characters from the realm of science fiction and horror films.

As with her Disasters (1986-89), Sherman has removed herself from this series of photographs. 

Through melting and cutting, she dismembers, mutilates and reconstructs dolls that were originally unnaturally exaggerated toys such as Barbie, GI Joe, the Disney characters Aladdin and Hercules and the gay-stereotype Billy and Carlos dolls.

After almost a decade of staging still lives with dolls and props, in her 2000 Head Shots, Sherman returned to using herself as a model. The format recalls headshots or vanity portraits made in garden-variety portrait studios, and features a cast of aging women.

Sherman's series of clown images feature riotous makeup, flamboyant costumes and digitally produced backgrounds of synthetic colors and patterns. Behind the sheer visual lushness and latent humor/horror, lies Sherman's interest in revealing the underlying pathos of the hysterically happy or intensely nasty clown image; the sadness of the character behind the greasepaint.

In her Society Portraits from 2008, Sherman continues her investigation into distorted ideas of beauty, self-image and aging. Set against opulent backdrops and presented in ornate frames, the characters seem at once tragic and vulgar, as each struggles with the impossible standards of beauty that prevail in a youth- and status-obsessed culture.

Sherman’s series of large-scale photographs from 2012 depict outsized female figures in ominous landscapes wearing Coco Chanel designs, gazing out at the spectator. The images are loosely based on an insert Sherman did for Garage magazine for which she dressed herself in high fashion wear, ranging from haute couture pieces from the 1920s designed by Coco Chanel to vintage Karl Lagerfield from the 1980s.

Sherman’s photographic series from 2016 focuses on women-of-a-certain-age who were perhaps once 1920s Hollywood starlets.These characters pose with exaggerated makeup, clothing meant to evoke the 1920s, and in seductive poses, all set against backgrounds that are digitally manipulated to allude to old film sets and backdrops.

In 2017 Sherman unlocked her private Instagram account to reveal dozens and dozens of manipulated selfies. With her face as canvas, she uses various phone apps to distort and reshape, to retouch, to add backgrounds and makeup, or moles and wrinkles — all with the swipe of a finger.