With her early work, Cindy Sherman revolutionized the role of the camera in artistic practice and opened the door for generations of artists and critics to rethink photography as a medium. On 4 May 2022, Hauser & Wirth New York will present over one hundred works from Sherman’s most groundbreaking and influential early series – including the complete set of 70 Untitled Film Stills, Rear Screen Projections and Centerfolds – in her first major solo exhibition with the gallery.
Preferring to work alone, Sherman was not only the photographer, but also the makeup artist, hairdresser, stylist, and director, casting herself as the star of heavily staged, fictional tableaux. Inspired by depictions of women in television, film, and advertising, her characters explored a range of female stereotypes – femme-fatale, career-girl, housewife, etc.– to confront the nature of identity and representation in the media in a way that remains surprising and relevant today. Created over forty years ago, these powerful, enigmatic bodies of work are touchstones of contemporary art that continue to inspire and influence the course of art and image-making.
Sherman began making the Untitled Film Stills in the fall of 1977 just after moving to New York City at twenty-three years old. This iconic series of eight-by-ten-inch black-and-white photographs was originally conceived as a group of imaginary film stills from a single actress’s career. What began as an experiment in how to imply narrative without involving other people would evolve into 70 works over the next three years. Inspired by 1950s and 1960s Hollywood, film noir, B movies, and European art-house films, Sherman’s plethora of invented characters and scenarios imitated the style of production shots used by movie studios to publicize their films. The images are evocative of certain character types and genres, but always intentionally ambiguous, leaving room for the viewer to insert themselves into the work and walk away with their own interpretations. The entire set of Untitled Film Stills, the only series Sherman ever officially named, will be presented together in this exhibition for the first time since they were shown at the Museum of Modern Art for the artist’s retrospective exhibition in 2012.
Sherman stopped making the Untitled Film Stills in 1980 and began working in color. She continued to use herself as a model, transforming her appearance with various costumes, makeup, and wigs, leaving the narrative of her scenes deliberately vague. However, instead of making use of existing light and locations, Sherman brought her work back into the controlled environment of her studio, posing in front of locations projected onto a large screen – a technique made famous in several of Alfred Hitchcock’s films – to create the series now known as the Rear Screen Projections. Unlike the Untitled Film Stills, with their artificial narratives set in real locations, this series presents women no longer bound by their physical surroundings.
Around the same time that she was making the Rear Screen Projections, Sherman was commissioned to create new images for Artforum magazine. Continuing her exploration of the tension between artifice and identity in consumer culture, she responded with a series clearly referencing erotic images commonly found in the middle of men’s magazines at the time. Reversing the dynamic of male photographer and female pin-up by assuming both roles, Sherman subverted the genre here – replacing the traditional nude woman with fully clothed female subjects reclining in emotionally suggestive yet ambivalently distanced poses. The photographs were ultimately never published by the magazine for fear of public backlash and instead became a critically acclaimed series of 12 large-scale horizontal color works known as the Centerfolds. Designed to make viewers uncomfortable, the series continues to challenge expectations surrounding this type of photograph, drawing attention to the way we consume images – especially of women.
