Cindy Sherman / The great American artist

 

Look Three
Cindy is wearing a vintage khaki cotton shirt from Search & Destroy. The vintage studded leather vest is by Schott, from Southpaw Vintage.

Cindy
Sherman

The great American artist

Text by Heidi Julavits

Portraits by Inez & Vinoodh

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Issue nº 19, Spring & Summer 2019

For almost 50 years, Cindy Sherman has been plundering her dressing-up box to turn herself into ingénues and society matrons, pin-ups and clowns – grotesquely familiar versions of the masks we all wear to face the world. She does this alone in her Hudson Square studio, surrounded only by the props – fake boobs, wigs, bits of mannequins – that help her create iconic images that contain not an ounce of Cindy Sherman. 

Cindy Sherman / ‘Little girls play dress-up – but I was always trying to be a monster instead of a fairy’

Cindy Sherman

Cindy Sherman: ‘Little girls play dress-up – but I was always trying to be a monster instead of a fairy’

By casting herself in imaginary movies and fashion shoots, the artist changed the way we see women. But did she also invent the thirst trap selfie? As her early work is shown in Athens, she talks image, AI and Instagram

Nadie Khomami

8 July 2024

I posted a mirror selfie to Instagram last night, I tell Cindy Sherman. There were so many things to consider. Were the lighting and angle flattering? Did I capture my good side?

She laughs. “I do find it fascinating,” she says, “this whole tradition of taking a selfie in a mirror. You can see how a person’s posed, the way they’re holding the camera. There can be different outfits every day, but you’re always in your elevator. In a way it becomes a conceptual photography project. It’s funny.”

“Untitled #654,” 2023. Photograph by Cindy Sherman 

Cindy Sherman’s Grotesque Digital Creations

In a new series of collages made by hand and with Photoshop, Sherman is as unrecognizable as she’s ever been, but the figures she depicts can’t be easily disentangled from herself.

By Chris Wiley
February 20, 2024

Cindy Sherman, the grande dame of the Pictures Generation, has a new show up at Hauser & Wirth’s recently opened space in SoHo—a collection of wacky, digitally collaged character studies, which continue her multipronged expedition into the outer realms of persona building, artifice, and the fun-house world of media images. The gallery bills it as a neighborhood homecoming of sorts, describing in a press release how Sherman mounted the New York début of her epochal series “Untitled Film Stills” in SoHo, at the nonprofit gallery Artists Space, some forty-odd years ago. The pedant in me is compelled to note that Artists Space was in Tribeca at the time of the 1978 exhibition, having moved from Wooster Street down to Hudson Street the year before, but I grant that it was within spitting distance of SoHo if you were a very good spitter.

Top 100 women / Cindy Sherman

Cindy Sherman

Top 100 women: art, film, music and fashion

Cindy Sherman

American artist and photographer, famed for her self-portraits in disguise, subverting notions of identity and gender

Emine Saner
Tuesday 8 March 2011 00.05 GMT

"T

he work is what it is and hopefully it's seen as feminist work, or feminist-advised work," says Cindy Sherman about her art, "but I'm not going to go around espousing theoretical bullshit about feminist stuff." But feminists were eager to claim her, inspired by her photographs that were not self-portraits but spoke of gender, identity and power.

In her early Untitled Film Stills, Sherman, always her own favourite muse, appears as B-movie cliches – as sex object or domestic drudge. In her Centerfolds series, she appears as a seductress and in another as terrified and vulnerable. Sherman, 57, has become everything from career woman to clown, beauty to hag, doll to dead, playing with disguise and stereotypes.

Her work, spanning more than 30 years, has made her one of the most important, and collected, female artists in the world. Last year, a 6ft photograph of Sherman as a muddied corpse sold for a record $2.7m (£1.7m).

THE GUARDIAN

The top 10 self-portraits in art

Self-Portrait With Charlie (1995) by David Hockney.
Photograph: David Hockney

The top 10 self-portraits in art

From an anxious Lucian Freud to an enigmatic Rembrandt and a noirish Cindy Sherman, these self-portraits take the selfie to a new artistic level

Jonathan Jones
Thursday 4 September 2014 14.23 BST

David Hockney – Self-Portrait With Charlie (1995)

Hockney is ruthless in his self-portraits; he never poses or tries to look good. What he does is to record the act of self-portraiture – the fact of a painter looking in a mirror and trying to record what he sees – and give it a deliberately awkward material truth. In doing so, he paints the ideal of honest observation.

Parmigianino – Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (c 1524)

 Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (c 1524) by Parmigianino. Photograph: Heritage Images/Getty Images

It's not only modern artists who portray themselves in thought-provoking ways. In the early 16th-century, Parmigianino looked at himself in a convex mirror and painted his distorted reflection, his huge hand close to the surface of the picture, his face the focus of a selfie-like bubble image, in which time and space warp vertiginously. This precocious painting is the theme of John Ashbery's great poem, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.

Pablo Picasso – Self-Portrait Facing Death (1972)

Picasso always portrayed himself with big eyes that seem to swallow up the beholder, insisting, even as he turns himself into a painted object, that it is he, not you, who does the looking. Those eyes were never bigger – or braver – than in this unillusioned, atheist painting of the artist battered by time and recognising the nearness of his own mortality.