“I really don’t think that they [Film Stills] are about me. It’s maybe about me not wanting to be me and wanting to be all these other characters. Or at least try them on.” Cindy Sherman

Cindy Sherman’s iconic black and white film stills created between 1977 and 1980 host a myriad of women—while Sherman herself may be the model, she emphatically de-categorizes this body of works as self-portraits. She aims to be a blank canvas upon which her female guises are rendered, as movie stars out of an Alfred Hitchcock film with Gregory Peck just a few steps out of the frame. A film still without a film, her photographs leave the characters without a plot; as she once elaborated, “They’re sort of blank. It makes the viewer come up with the narrative.” (Cindy Sherman in “How I Made It: Cindy Sherman on Her 'Untitled Film Stills,’” New York Magazine, April 7, 2008)

The present lot, Untitled Film Still (#36) glimpses a dark haired woman undressing, gently peeling away an almost translucent article of clothing. The glowing light from the background creates a sensual, slim silhouette, suggesting the figure as changing behind a curtain, shielded from the bright lights of a movie set. The simple composition emits a glow of tactility in the skin of her arms and the thin soft veil of a curtain. Untitled Film Still (#36) captures a distinctly private yet visually pleasing moment of intimacy. Sherman describes how she is “vulnerable by being this other character,” and through exposing us to these previously inaccessible femme fatales, she taps into the American obsession with peeking behind-the-scenes of famous characters only captured on the big screen or spotted on Fifth Avenue.

The Film Stills were conceived in 1977, as the artist has explained, “When I moved to New York, in the summer of ’77, I was trying to think of a new way to take pictures and tell a story. “(Cindy Sherman in “How I Made It: Cindy Sherman on Her 'Untitled Film Stills,’” New York Magazine, April 7, 2008) While trying to develop a story, Sherman additionally explores her own identity by wearing a mask, trying various outfits, lipsticks and personalities, exploiting her uncanny ability to be a “chameleon”, which she has described as troublesome in her personal relationships yet incredibly useful in her creative body of works. She describes her Film Stills “like I wasn’t wearing my normal armor. I was vulnerable by being this other character. We’re all products of what we want to project to the world. Even people who don’t spend any time, or think they don’t, on preparing themselves for the world out there—I think that ultimately they have for their whole lives groomed themselves to be a certain way, to present a face to the world.” Untitled Film Still (#36) disarms us of the shield that protects us from the world and replaces it with a holistic sense of humanity, displacing the necessity to be outwardly perfect with the acceptance to feel eternally human.