Untitled #71, 2024

Cindy Sherman   Master Artists

Cindy Sherman is an American artist photographer born in 1954 in New York, the city where she still lives and works today. She studied painting at State University College in Buffalo, then became interested in conceptual art, which allowed her to discover photography. Freshly graduated, she began the series "Untitled Film Stills" in Manhattan in 1977.

Cindy Sherman sees photography as a medium of conceptual art. Through her work, she questions the place of this discipline in artistic production in general, putting it in particular in relation to painting.

The woman in society, here is one of the artist's recurring themes. Sherman is indeed known to the general public for her surprising staging, in which she uses her own body as a model. She sarcastically denounces the image of women returned to the contemporary world. The artist advocates an erasure of identities in favor of the recognition of people as human beings. With it, the boxes and social rankings explode.

Cindy Sherman has a habit of working in series, for periods of a few months or a few years.

With two university comrades, Longo and Clough, she created the “Hallwalls”, an independent exhibition space.

She worked for major brands, including the MAC cosmetics brand.

A curious and protean artist, she is also interested in the world of animation and cinema. She made her first short film in 1975, “Doll Clothes”. In 1997, on the strength of this first experience as a director, she signed her first feature film, “Office Killer”, a horror film which deals with the place of women in our Western societies.

Cindy Sherman has participated in several exhibitions, including one at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA). In 2013, she was curator at the Venice Biennale. She received her first award in 1999, with the Hasselblad Prize, then in 2012 with the Haftmann Prize. In 2016, she won the Praemium Imperiale.