Cindy Sherman
January 27–April 8, 2017
Berlin
A thirty-five year career in photography has established Cindy Sherman as one of the most influential figures in contemporary art. Since the 1970s, she has created photographic portraits that are predicated on themes of identity, gender and role-play. Parodying the representation of women in film and television, fashion magazines, advertising, and online, she adopts limitless guises that illuminate the performative nature of subjectivity and sexuality. She is perhaps best known for the early black-and-white photographic series Untitled Film Stills (1977-1980). In this work, Sherman staged herself as an actress in fictitious film scenes that mined the aesthetics of mid-century Hollywood film, film noir and B-movies. By over-dramatizing stereotypical and clichéd imagery of women, she rendered it critically perceptible – commenting both on the construction of identity and the strategies of media representation. In other series such as Centrefolds (1981), Fashion Photos (1984-1984), Sex Pictures (1992) and Clowns (2004), Sherman transformed herself through make-up, wigs, costumes and prosthetics into roles that yo-yo between provocative, passive, pornographic, abject, and grotesque.