PHOTO:Cindy Sherman
Cindy Sherman is widely recognized as one of the most important and influential artists in contemporary art. Throughout her career, she has presented a sustained, eloquent, and provocative exploration of the construction of contemporary identity and the nature of representation, drawn from the unlimited supply of images from movies, TV, magazines, the Internet, and art history.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: National Portrait Gallery Archive
In Cindy Sherman’s solo exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery her groundbreaking series, “Untitled Film Still” (1977-80,) are on public display for the first time in the UK, in a major new retrospective featuring around 180 works from International Public and Private Collections, as well as new work never before displayed in a public gallery. The exhibition focuses on the artist’s manipulation of her own appearance and her deployment of material derived from a range of cultural sources in order to create imaginary portraits that explore the tension between façade and identity. The highlights of the exhibition are five of Sherman’s “Cover Girl” series, completed when she was a student at Buffalo State College , displayed together for the first time. In “Cover Girl (Vogue)” (1976/2011) Cindy Sherman photographed herself on the cover of Vogue as Jerry Hall, the supermodel girlfriend of Mick Jagger. The first photograph in this triptych is the original cover with Hall, photographed in black-and-white. In the second photograph we see Sherman’s face, which suddenly looks a lot like Hall’s. In the third photograph, Sherman winks playfully back at the camera, spoiling any illusion of resemblance. Cindy Sherman first gained widespread critical recognition for “Untitled Film Stills”, the series that she commenced shortly after moving to New York in 1977. Comprising 70 images, the work was the artist’s first major artistic statement and defined her approach. With Sherman herself as model wearing a range of costumes and hairstyles, her black and white images captured the look of 1950s and 60s Hollywood, film noir, B movies and European art-house films. Building on that layer of artifice, the fictional situations she created were photographed in a way that recalls the conventions of yesterday’s cinema. As a result, each photograph depicts its subject, namely the artist, refracted through a layer of artifice, a veneer of representation. Other key works are shown from the artist’s most important series including “Rear Screen Projections”, “Centrefolds”, “History Portraits”, “Fairy Tales”, “Sex Pictures”, “Masks”, “Headshots”, “Clowns” and “Society Portraits”. In a revealing juxtaposition, Ingres’s celebrated portrait of Madame Moitessier has been borrowed especially for the exhibition and is displayed alongside Sherman’s version of that historic painting. Working as her own model for more than 30 years, Cindy Sherman has captured herself in a range of guises and personas which are at turns amusing and disturbing, distasteful and affecting. To create her photographs, she assumes multiple roles of photographer, model, makeup artist, hairdresser, stylist, and wardrobe mistress. With an arsenal of wigs, costumes, makeup, prosthetics, and props, Sherman has deftly altered her physique and surroundings to create a myriad of intriguing tableaus and characters, from screen siren to clown to aging socialite. A range of source material from the artist’s studio is shown in order to provide unprecedented insights into her working processes.
Info: Curator: Paul Moorhouse, National Portrait Gallery, St Martin’s Place, London, Duration: 27/6-15/9/19, Days & Hours: Mon-Thu & Sat-Sun 10:00-18:00, Fri 10:00-21:00, www.npg.org.uk
