Cindy Sherman — Hauser & Wirth Gallery, New York
On the occasion of her new exhibition at the Hauser & Wirth Gallery in New York, photographer Cindy Sherman unveils a series of portraits that continue the exploration of her representation through fragmented elements borrowing from both art history and mass culture. A staggering and dizzying tour de force that delights while emphasizing the artist’s significance in the history of contemporary art, which we invite you to discover through images.
Having redefined the standards of fine art photography for about four decades and anticipated the upcoming explosion of self-representation through images, Cindy Sherman has never ceased her exploration and has not abandoned the practice of self-portraiture that has constituted the core of her work. While irony seemed to take precedence over invention in some of her recent works, this latest striking and remarkably effective series reconnects with the inventive aspect of satire and the ambiguous emotion in the grotesque.
Untitled, with no other words than the accompanying quote, “When I’m shooting, I’m trying to get to a point where I’m basically not recognizing myself”, the exhibition rigorously juxtaposes the passionate expressions of close-up faces, with a metronome-like precision. There, in the external variety and internal derangement of emotions, character and person blend for what they represent in common as icons, a status the artist has acquired through abstraction.
An astonishing and finally acknowledged ability to thwart the face, not only to merge her identity with the double but to truly integrate this double into the representation of the disarticulated and deconstructed model that is Cindy Sherman’s face. The very face that surpasses her and belongs to us all.
Preeminent American artist Cindy Sherman unveils her latest body of work for the first time in the United States at Hauser & Wirth’s Wooster Street location in New York City. The exhibition features approximately 30 new works and marks Sherman’s return to the historic SoHo district where, in the late 1970s, she debuted her now iconic Untitled Film Stills at the non-profit Artists Space, launching a career that has established her as one of the most recognized and influential artists of our time. Sherman’s ground-breaking work has probed themes of representation and identity in contemporary media for over four decades. Since the early 2000s, she has constructed personae using digital manipulation, meditating on the increasingly fractured sense of self in 21st century society and continuing an artistic exploration that has uniquely encapsulated her œuvre since the outset of her career.
