Cindy Sherman

Emerging out of this tantalizing artistic primeval soup came Cindy Sherman, who combined elements from each of these social and art movements when she created a series of staged grade "B" movie stills, starring none other than herself. She was always alone, often in disguise, so that she became everyone and no one…

Cindy Sherman appears in all of these photographs. Some of these compositions reference specific paintings or artists; others are mainly inventions that merge aspects of "masterpieces" from different places and times. In either case, the way the works are made links them not so much to the history of painting as to photographic reproductions of paintings…

Sherman’s reputation was established on the basis of her Untitled Film Stills, a series of black-and-white photographs from the late 1970s in which the artist depicted herself dressed in the guises of clichéd B-movie heroines. In photograph after photograph, Sherman was ever present, and yet never really there—her ready adaptation of a range of personae highlighting the masquerade of identity…

Works in the Tate collection

Selected works Collection The Museum of Modern Art, New York.