Cindy Sherman

Cindy Sherman grew up in Huntington, Long Island before enrolling in the visual arts department at Buffalo State University in 1972, where she majored in painting. It was now that she began to explore the ideas that would define her later work: dressing herself as different characters, cobbled together from thrift-store clothing. Frustrated with what she saw as the limitations of painting as a medium of art, she abandoned it and took up photography. She graduated with a BA in 1976 and is, along with artists like Barbara Kruger (born 1945), considered to be part of the Pictures Generation.

Cindy Sherman works primarily with photographic self-portraits, depicting her in a variety of contexts, in the guise of different imagined characters. Sherman’s work often call attention to stereotypes of women in society, movies, television and magazines. Her breakthrough work is generally considered to be the collection Untitled Film Stills, a series of 70 black-and-white photographs of herself evoking typical female roles in performance media (especially arthouse films and popular B-movies). Untitled Film Stills were first exhibited at the non-profit gallery Artists Space, where Sherman was working as a receptionist.

Sherman works in series, typically photographing herself in a range of costumes. To create her photographs, she shoots alone in her studio, assuming multiple roles as author, director, make-up artist, hairstylist, wardrobe mistress and model. In addition to her film stills, Sherman has appropriated several other visual forms – the centerfold, fashion photograph, historical portrait and soft-core sex image.

Sherman’s career has also included several fashion series, including designs for Prada, Dolce & Gabbana and Marc Jacobs. In 1994 she produced the Post Card Series for Comme des Garcons for the brand’s autumn/winter 1994 – 1995 collections in collaboration with Rei Kawakubo (born 1942). In 2006, Sherman created a series of fashion advertisements for designer Marc Jacobs (born 1963). The advertisements themselves were photographed by Juergen Teller (born 1964) and released as a book by Rizzoli. For Balenciaga, she created the six-image series Cindy Sherman: Untitled (Balenciaga) in 2008.

Sherman’s first solo show in New York was presented at a noncommercial space, The Kitchen, in 1980. When Metro Pictures Gallery opened later that year, Sherman’s photographs were the first show. Sherman has since participated in numerous international events, including the Venice Biennale (1982 and 1995) and, no fewer than, five Whitney Biennials. Her work has also been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1982), Kunsthalle, Basel (1991), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1998) and Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin (2007) among others. Major travelling retrospectives of her work has been organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1997) as well as Jeu de Paume, Paris (2006 – 2007). In 2019, the National Portrait Gallery, London organized a major retrospective of her works from the mid-1970s to the present.

In 2010, Sherman’s, nearly six-foot tall, chromogenic colour print Untitled #153 (1985) was sold by Phillips de Pury & Company for $2.7 million, near the $3 million high estimate. In 2011, a print of Untitled #96 fetched $3.89 million at Christie’s, making it the most expensive photograph at that time.

Cindy Sherman was represented by Metro Pictures, for 40 years, and by Sprüth Magers, before moving to Hauser & Wirth in 2021.

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