In 1993 Cindy Sherman was invited by Harper’s Bazaar to showcase the Spring designs. The present lot was the lead image in the editorial. Sherman, here in Dior, creates the character of a court jester, gleefully posing for the camera in high fashion and in a scene of her own making. In the accompanying article, Jim Lewis writes, ‘So in a way they’re fun-house mirrors: Every viewer will bring to them his or her own beliefs about femininity and see them reflected back distorted and transformed, to the point that any approach to beauty seems possible. If the artist is after something more specific, she isn't saying. The purpose of the pictures, after all, is to allow people to think for themselves: The context is fashion, and the medium is photography, but the goal is a freedom more basic and real than either.”
Harper’s Bazaar, ‘The New Cindy Sherman Collection,’ May 1993
The power of fashion, and the characters Sherman embodies in the clothes she chooses, continues to be a predominant component of Sherman’s work, including a 2012 series in which she exclusively wore Haute Couture. In March 2016, Sherman’s work once again graced the pages of Harper’s Bazaar to showcase the Spring designs with a project titled Cindy Sherman Street Style Star.
Provenance
Metro Pictures, New York Collection of Monique Knowlton, New York Simon Lee, London
Exhibited
Inverted Odysseys: Claude Cahun, Maya Deren, Cindy Sherman, Grey Art Gallery, New York University, November 1999–January 2000
Literature
"The New Cindy Sherman Collection," Harper's Bazaar, May 1993, p. 145 Respini, Cindy Sherman, pl. 33
Seminal to the Pictures Generation as well as contemporary photography and performance art, Cindy Sherman is a powerhouse art practitioner. Wily and beguiling, Sherman's signature mode of art making involves transforming herself into a litany of characters, historical and fictional, that cross the lines of gender and culture. She startled contemporary art when, in 1977, she published a series of untitled film stills.
Through mise-en-scène and movie-like make-up and costume, Sherman treats each photograph as a portrait, though never one of herself. She embodies her characters even if only for the image itself. Presenting subversion through mimicry, against tableaus of mass media and image-based messages of pop culture, Sherman takes on both art history and the art world.
Though a shape-shifter, Sherman has become an art world celebrity in her own right. The subject of solo retrospectives across the world, including a blockbuster showing at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and a frequent exhibitor at the Venice Biennale among other biennials, Sherman holds an inextricable place in contemporary art history.