Cindy Sherman
American
For over four decades, Cindy Sherman has explored the fluid and performative nature of identity, using photography to dissect the visual and cultural codes of gender, celebrity, and artifice. A key figure of the Pictures Generation—a group that also includes Richard Prince, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, and Robert Longo—Sherman came of age in the 1970s, responding to the pervasive influence of mass media with both critical insight and subversive wit. Like her peers, she appropriated imagery from advertising, cinema, television, and magazines, questioning the authenticity and authority of cultural representations.Sherman's fascination with role-playing and self-invention has remained central to her work. “I wish I could treat every day as Halloween,” she once said, “and get dressed up and go out into the world as some eccentric character.” This spirit shaped her breakthrough series Untitled Film Stills (1977–80), created shortly after her move to New York. In these photographs, she staged herself as archetypal women drawn from mid-20th-century B movies—housewives, ingénues, femme fatales—using props, costumes, and settings to evoke the promotional stills of classic cinema. Made when she was only 23, these 70 black-and-white images became iconic in feminist and postmodern discourse, challenging the passive roles assigned to women in visual culture and revealing how identity is constructed through repeated media tropes.Sherman has since continued to reinvent herself, creating serial works that examine the limits of self-representation and the stereotypes embedded in visual language. In series like Centerfolds (1981), History Portraits (1988–90), and Society Portraits (2008), she portrays a wide range of fictional personas—from Renaissance noblewomen to aging socialites—using elaborate costumes and theatrical effects. Her disguises often intentionally fail: wigs slip, makeup smears, and prosthetics reveal their artifice. Rather than concealing these imperfections, Sherman emphasizes them, turning the cracks in her illusions into metaphors for the constructed, unstable nature of all identity.Though she occasionally depicts glamorous figures, Sherman is more deeply drawn to the grotesque. In provocative series such as Disasters (1986–89) and Sex Pictures (1992), she confronts viewers with disfigured, abject bodies—works that challenge aesthetic norms and confront darker dimensions of human experience. Created during the height of the AIDS crisis, these images took on added urgency, confronting the fragility of the body and the social taboos surrounding it. “I’m disgusted with how people get themselves to look beautiful,” she remarked in 1986. “I’m much more fascinated with the other side.”Across her career, Sherman has relentlessly subverted the visual shorthand we rely on to define people and roles. By exposing the artifice behind identity and representation, she invites us to question the images we consume—and the assumptions they quietly reinforce.