Cindy Sherman first came to the public’s attention with her series of black and white photographs,
Untitled Film Stills, all featuring images of the artist herself in various guises, in setting designed to look like scenes from actual movies. These portraits were created after many hours of careful research into locations and costumes – resulting in unique, thought-provoking imagery. Throughout her career Sherman has continued to work on her own, creating new photo series and the occasional movie – all exploring a multitude of themes, including the grotesque and the glamorous. Her works are characterized as Conceptual Art. She welcomes the debate that her works often provoke, saying “I want people to imagine different stories looking at my work. That’s kind of what I want.” She was the subject of a large-scale retrospective exhibition at MoMA in 2012. Most recently, she has exhibited 20 new images, her first new body of work since 2012. The pieces, created over a two-month period feature Sherman in poses and landscapes reminiscent of the stylized photos of actresses in the 1920s.
Cindy Sherman first came to the public’s attention with her series of black and white photographs,
Untitled Film Stills, all featuring images of the artist herself in various guises, in settings designed to look like scenes from actual movies. These portraits were created after many hours of careful research into locations and costumes – resulting in unique, thought-provoking imagery.
As a child, she didn’t show any interest in art until her older brothers and sisters gave her their leftover crayons and paints to play with – then she found that she was quite good at it! She also liked to play dress-up. “I was usually not the one becoming the princess or ballerina. I would be the monster or an old lady!”
She went to study painting at the State University of New York at Buffalo, but became more interested in photography. When it was pointed out that, from childhood, she had always liked to create different personas using make-up and costumes, she realized that she should start to document these characters and so made herself the subject of her photographic work.
“The reason I don’t think of them as self-portraits is that I’m not trying to express anything about myself in the pictures. I just acted as the way an actress on stage or in a film did.”
Unlike many other artists, she usually works on her own. “I feel I can be completely free, uninhibited to do whatever I need to do, if I’m alone.”
The images that she creates are not always easy to enjoy, in fact there are periods of her career where she has deliberately focused on the grotesque or on images reminiscent of horror movies. She welcomes the controversy and debate saying, “I want people to imagine different stories looking at my work. That’s kind of what I want. But I realize I have to keep it open ended so the people can discover their own stories.” Her passion for horror is such that she directed a horror movie in addition to allowing it to inform her photographic work.
In 2012, she was the subject of a large-scale retrospective exhibition at MoMA in New York. However, following that success she seemed to put her photography on hold, not showing any new works until this year when she burst back onto the scene with a major exhibition of 20 new images. The pieces, created over a two-month period, using a cutting edge printing technique where the image is printed to aluminum plates, feature Sherman in poses and landscapes reminiscent of the stylized photos of actresses in the 1920s.
“When you are at my age, it really shows on film and I couldn’t help it. So, I thought what if those young actresses in 1920s simply aged into this day.”
She works in a studio on the top floor of a Manhattan building and lives in a house on Long Island with a ballpark-size garden and five chickens.
