Cindy Sherman

CINDY SHERMAN is exhibiting (December 6-January 7) her first series of color photographs, a departure from her black and white "Untitled Film Stills" of the past several years. Sherman herself continues to be the subject in each of the photographs, essentially "performing" in the still photograph as an actress does in a film. Each photograph presents a character in a setting that seems to suggest a familiar narrative reality but is not specifically identifiable. Sherman's women are familiar types or stereotypes known primarily through the fictive medium of film. In the new color work, Sherman poses against rear-screen projected backgrounds.

"...Sherman is original, inventive, emotionally acute, observant, light and vigorous... Her resourcefulness has been inexhaustible... The structure of her pictures are as solid as they are unconventional — or as her observation of women is broad and precise."
— Ben Lifson, Village Voice

"Sherman's photographs invite psychological interpretations and set off an imaginative process... Sherman's images provoke associative thinking and encourage speculation about place and role."
— Linda Cathcart, Contemporary Arts Center, Houston

"Sherman's women are not women but images of women, specular models of femininity projected by the media to encourage imitation, identification; they are... tropes... the uncanny precision with which Sherman presents these tropes, the very perfection of her impersonation, leaves an unresolved margin of incongruity in which the image, freed from the constraints of referential and symbolic meaning, can accomplish its 'work.'"
— Craig Owens, October Magazine

Sherman's work has been seen in one-person exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; the Kitchen Center, New York; and in group shows at the Albright-Knox Museum, Buffalo; Musee d'Art Moderne, Paris; Artists Space, N.Y.; A-Space, Toronto; Max Protech Gallery, N.Y.; Texas Gallery, Houston; and Castelli Graphics, N.Y.

Sherman is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.