Cindy Sherman was born January 19, 1954 in Glen Ridge, NJ. She emerged onto the New York art scene in the early 1980s by turning the camera on herself, not as self-portrait, but as a commentary on the role and representation of women in society, the media and the nature of the creation of art. Having graduated from State University College, Buffalo, New York, in 1976, she moved to New York the following year, at a time when the art world was obsessed with debates surrounding authorship and the role of originality, the condition of the photographic image, and the increasing commodification of art. Sherman’s reputation was established on the basis of her Untitled Film Stills, a series of black-and-white photographs from the late 1970s in which the artist depicted herself dressed in the guises of clichéd B-movie heroines. In photograph after photograph, Sherman was ever present, and yet never really there—her ready adaptation of a range of personae highlighting the masquerade of identity. Her appropriation of the space on both sides of the lens destabilized the traditionally gendered opposition between artist and model, object and subject. Sherman completed this career-establishing project three years later, in 1980, when she "ran out of clichés" with which to work. Then in 1981, Sherman was commissioned by the respected magazine Artforum to do a "centerfold" for one of their upcoming issues. Sherman proceeded to submit a series of images with a cohesive aesthetic look: the camera was placed above Sherman, who was often crouched on the ground or made to look like she was in a state of reverie. This series, as well as an additional series of Sherman in a pink robe, was rejected by Artforum 's editor, Ingrid Sischy, who claimed that these photographs "might be misunderstood." From there, Sherman went on to change her style almost entirely in what are often referred to as the Disasters and Fairy Tales series. For the first time in her public career, Sherman was not the model in all of the images. Shot from 1985 until 1989, these images are far more grotesque than Sherman's earlier work. Feeling pigeonholed by the feminist discourse that surrounded her work, Sherman liberated herself by gradually dispensed with representations of the female and moving toward this more fantastic and lurid imagery. The ever-increasing market for her photographs also prompted this turn, challenging her to attempt to create work that was “unsaleable” due to its visceral depictions of vomit, body parts, and grotesque fairy tales. Simultaneously, she instilled the works with a heightened sense of artifice created by garish colors and gaps that reveal the fiction behind the illusion. In addition to numerous group exhibitions, her work was the subject of solo exhibitions at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, in 1982 and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in 1987. A retrospective organized by the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam, traveled throughout Europe in 1996 and 1997. Sherman also made an appearance in front of the camera, making a cameo playing herself in John Waters' 1998 comedy Pecker. The artist currently resides in New York. |
