Cindy Sherman American, b. 1954

Cindy Sherman (b. 1954) is among the most influential artists of her generation, and for five decades she has photographed herself without making a single self-portrait. She is model, stylist, costumier, make-up artist, director and photographer at once, but the subject is never Sherman herself. It is the repertoire of types that film, advertising, painting and, later, social media have taught us to read as women.

Born in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, and raised on Long Island, Sherman studied at Buffalo State College, where she abandoned painting for photography and, in 1974, co-founded the artist-run space Hallwalls with Robert Longo and Charles Clough. She moved to New York in 1977 and became part of the group of artists later known as the Pictures Generation, whose subject was the image world itself.

The Untitled Film Stills, sixty-nine black-and-white photographs made between 1977 and 1980, place a young woman in scenes that seem remembered from postwar cinema but are entirely invented. The sixty-nine solitary heroines map a particular constellation of fictional femininity that took hold in postwar America. Although most of the characters are invented, we sense immediately that we already know them. Sherman initially printed the photographs small, in editions of ten, and sold them for fifty dollars each. The Museum of Modern Art acquired the complete set in 1995. What followed pressed the argument further: the Centerfolds of 1981, commissioned and then rejected by Artforum; the fairy tales and disasters of the mid-1980s; the History Portraits, made in Rome with prosthetics and false noses; the Society Portraits of wealthy women in their sixties and seventies; and the more recent work produced through digital manipulation and phone applications.

Sherman received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1995, the Hasselblad Award in 1999 and the Praemium Imperiale in 2016. She represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1982 and participated again in the central exhibition in 1995 and 2011. The Museum of Modern Art gave her a full retrospective in 2012, which travelled to San Francisco, Minneapolis and Dallas; the National Portrait Gallery in London followed with a retrospective in 2019, and the Fondation Louis Vuitton mounted a survey in 2020.

Sherman’s work is held by The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Tate, the Centre Pompidou, the Broad and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among many others. Bruce Silverstein Gallery has presented her work Summer Glow (2024) and REWIND (2021).