With the help of stage make-up, prosthetics, wigs, costumes and, more recently, digital tools, she has shapeshifted into hundreds of characters, among them B-movie ingénues, terrifying clowns, Renaissance Madonnas, and society matrons. Framed artworks mingle with print-outs and magazine pages tacked haphazardly to the walls. Then, after we were together for a year or two and all these projects fell through and he was acting like I'm such a failure and I was trying to help him – I thought, if he just had some help, he'd blossom and be a nice, decent person. Did money make her feel different about herself? I expect her to say yes, but she's not having any of it. She has painted some of the most famous and beautiful faces in the world such as Gisele Bundchen, Zoe Saldana, Miranda Kerr, Tilda Swinton, to artists such as Cindy Sherman. The MIT Press, 2006. Was dressing up a means of escape? Explore Tate’s growing collection of British and international art, and our archive of sketchbooks, letters and photographs. "The pictures were meant to be disturbing. ‘I guess technically they’re pictures of me, but not, because I’m doing all these weird things to my face so it doesn’t look anything like me.’ As in all of her work, she wants the artifice to be evident. Enjoy the best Cindy Sherman Quotes at BrainyQuote. When I heard that, I said, 'Dad, I'm sorry, I'm not going to do that. ‘Cindy Sherman’ is at the National Portrait Gallery, London, until 15 September. The five works in the series are comprised of a trio of women’s magazine covers: in each, the first image is a real cover, from Cosmopolitan, Vogue, Family Circle, Redbook, and Mademoiselle, respectively; for the second, Sherman replaced the model’s face with her own, painstakingly copying the original make-up and pose, while the third shows Sherman making an unflattering or playful face – a send-up of the impossible standards of femininity such magazines promoted. I love weird stuff; a good, weird flea market anywhere is really my favourite place to be.’, Cindy Sherman photographed in her studio in New York in Aprill 2019. Arguably, Sherman’s experiments with masquerade began when she was growing up in suburban Long Island. Share with your friends. I never thought about it; it was just in a file somewhere,’ Sherman says. The painter’s witty and deceptively effortless works combine high and low culture to enjoyable effect. We go upstairs to look at the new exhibition, which papers the walls from top to bottom. There have been times when she has not wanted to attend her own openings because she felt old friends were resentful towards her. Does she tend to document relationships in everyday life? We meet at Sprüth Magers, a tiny gallery in central London that is holding an exhibition of her new work. New York based artist, Cindy Sherman, is famous for her photographs of women in which she is not only the photographer, but also the subject. Private collection, Paris. The irreverent protagonist and co-director (with Tom Donahue) of the new documentary Guest of Cindy Sherman tells Interview why his ex is “not comfortable” with his film, and why he’s been called both too sensitive and a “sexist bastard.” American, born 1954. "It might be a few months of concentrated work and then I'm just like, forget it – I don't ever want to go in the studio again, I don't want to put on any more make-up again, I'm so sick of those wigs, so sick of it all. The collaborations are ‘a way for me to feel like I’m getting kickstarted into getting back to work’. And then I went through a period when I went to sleep with great big curlers. All the photos are untitled – another way of distancing herself from the images. ‘I think of [Instagram] more like a sketchbook,’ she says. and then you go, 'Oh! The Woman With the Prosthetic Breasts: Cindy Sherman and Social Standards. Cindy Sherman: Me, myself and I She is the star of her own photographs but claims they aren't autobiographical. “CDC COVID-19 survival rates” are 99.997% for people ages 0 to 19, 99.98% for people ages 20 to 49, 99.5% for people ages 50 to 69, and 94.6% for people over 70. "I'd rather not talk about this," she says through her tears. Instead, she created a series of terrified, exposed and hunted women. Cindy Sherman talks to BAZAAR about fashion, photography and bringing her characters to life. She pauses and smiles. Don't shave or anything. "For the project I had to confront something difficult. ‘The thing is to be brave’ – Maggi Hambling toughs it out, Gordon Parks’s photographs bear powerful witness to Black lives in America, The Apollo 40 under 40 podcast: Mohamad Hafez, The week in art news – world’s oldest animal painting found in Indonesia, The week in art news – Indian Supreme Court approves plans for new parliament complex, The invasion of the Capitol fulfilled a warning from history – and will haunt us for years to come. Instead of conflating ‘selfies’ and self-portraits, shouldn’t museums stand up for historic art as worthy in its own right? Britannica website, Cindy Sherman Biography For the versions in the exhibition, the women appear against various unpopulated landscapes, making their desperate bids for attention seem all the more absurd as they pose for an absent crowd. Even nicer than Steve Martin, another ex? As a teenager, she was obsessed with appearance. In fact, nobody commented on it. Courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures, New York; © Cindy Sherman. But sometimes it’s really hard [afterwards] to get back into the whole process,’ she says. © Cindy Sherman, a self-pitying documentary he made about being the unsuccessful half of the relationship. "The one weird thing about being with David Byrne was I'd be like, 'God, David, don't you get sick of these people coming up you?' She turns to the picture of herself as Marilyn Monroe. When Sherman was in elementary school – she’s not sure exactly how old she was, but it was somewhere around eight – she began compiling an album of family snaps that she titled ‘A Cindy Book’, drawing a circle around herself in each image and captioning it, ‘That’s me’. Founded in 2009, Elephant.art is the definitive guide to contemporary art and visual culture. The photographs in the album, which is being exhibited for the first time, chart her changing appearance as she ages from an infant to a pre-teen. She nicknamed the series ‘Project Twirl’: ‘These women go to [runway shows] and have their limos let them off like two blocks before the show, so they can walk in front of all the photographers and do a little twirl, or a little dance, and get their photographs taken. But you can't control how people view your work. She grew up on Long Island and was the youngest of five children. ‘When I’d look through [boxes of family photos], I’d always ask my mother “Which one of those is me?” I guess it became interesting to me to pick myself out of a group of people,’ Sherman tells me. She looks much kinder than in many of her photographs. Cindy Sherman Takes Selfies (as Only She Could) on Instagram. Museum of Modern Art, 2003. Because the sibling closest to her age was nine years her senior, Sherman felt like an only child, sometimes forgotten in the … Something I'd never want to do." Gretchen had just completed editing a rock video for the thrash band Megadeth’s song, Peace Sells But Who’s Buying, directed by Robert Longo. Hey!" "Cindy Sherman at the Fondation Louis Vuitton" is on view in Paris through January 2021. My self-esteem still fluctuates." In the new work, she is more exposed than she has ever been before. "Oh yeah. It’s really about obliterating myself within these characters.’, Untitled #92 (1981), Cindy Sherman. By now, her mother had died, but her father enjoyed her success in typical fashion. Photograph: Courtesy Sprüth Magers Berlin London and Metro Pictures. "Or maybe you like this version of me." When she greets me at the door of her SoHo studio one afternoon in April, casually dressed and wearing no obvious make-up, I recognise her features, but not, exactly, her face. "', Did she think it crazy that a single photo could fetch $1m? I was only with that person for so long out of guilt, and he played up to it. We couldn't or didn't really want to go into the male-dominated painting world, so since there weren't any artists who were using photographs, we thought, 'Well, yeah, let's just play with that.' Sherman so convincingly appropriated cinematic codes that many early viewers believed that they could identify the specific scene she had supposedly ‘recreated’. "My sister warned me that he had arranged for me to give a talk there about my work and he'd put up fliers saying, 'Charlie Sherman's daughter coming to talk.' I give Cindy Sherman the once-over. Against a black-and-white background of what appears to be forest (it is, in fact, New York's Central Park), a series of wacky characters stand their ground: there is a woman with a disturbing resemblance to Phil Spector collecting spring onions; an elderly woman who appears to be disabled; a boy-man who could be a knight wearing a body suit of breasts and vagina; a woman who looks as if she lunches in the highest circles when not seeing her plastic surgeon. I'm looking for clues. Cindy Sherman's first audio interview in 10 years. Here she has created her "family" by digitally manipulating the faces – her face – so all the characters could be related to each other. Cindy Sherman (*1954) is a pivotal figure in the history of appropriation art and one of the world’s best-known contemporary artists. Why on earth did she go along with the film? And yet, with her subtle digital manipulations, it is still hard to find the real Sherman in these pictures. As a little girl, she'd visit thrift shops with her mother for outfits and back at home she amassed a suitcase of prom dresses. And she wouldn't have it any other way. "If anything, I feel more troubled by feeling guilt for being successful because most of my friends are not." For four decades, Cindy Sherman has probed the construction of identity, playing with the visual and cultural codes of art, celebrity, gender, and photography. "No. Working digitally, ‘I can start without really any idea in my mind and just be fooling around in front of the camera, take a few shots and look at them on my computer and say, “Well that’s a good direction to go in, let’s work with that kind of character.”’, Untitled #587 (2016/18), Cindy Sherman. ", But painting at the time was a male preserve, she says. Between 9:11 a.m. and 10:16 a.m. the man walked from a four-door sedan parked in front of the Sherman house, appears to enter the Sherman house through the front door, then comes back outside. And, through her deceits, she looked for truths about identity, vulnerability and power. More generally, the images continue Sherman’s investigation into the representation of femininity in mass media, proving, as she had done so already, the ease with which we conflate fantasy and reality. After working on a series of photographs, Sherman often feels that she never wants to take another photo. In the following interview, Sherman walks Art21 through the exhibition and discusses the ideas behind individual photographs as well as the overall series. ", Of course, there is more to her work than dressing up. I think I'm really observant, and thinking how a person is put together, seeing them on the street and noticing subtle things about them that make them who they are. Sherman is currently preparing for a retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery in London this summer (27 June–15 September). That just seemed hysterically funny – to be like, “Me, me, me, take my picture.”’ Sherman perfectly apes the affected, faux-casual poses and absurd, camera-grabbing outfits characteristic of the format: in one, she wears a sleek black wig and a mint-green Gucci pantsuit emblazoned with eyes and a mouth, with her hands resting in her pockets, and a hint of a smile; in another, four versions of the same woman – a perfectly coiffed blonde wearing an oversized hoodie – test out different poses. ‘When I’m shooting, it’s such an intense time for me that I need to get away from it and sort of forget about it. It is composed primarily of interviews between creative people working in a variety of disciplines—visual art, literature, film, music, theater, architecture, and dance. She was much younger than her four siblings and often felt left out. These include the Cover Girl series (1976; Fig. Yeah! While that worked for print, ‘It didn’t really translate in my mind as a big blown-up photograph.’ Over the next two years, she experimented with backgrounds in an attempt to make the images seem ‘a little more iconic’. In 2008, twenty of Cindy Sherman’s History Portraits (1989–1990) were exhibited at Skarstedt Gallery in New York City. Sherman is one of the world's leading artists – for 30 years, she has starred in all her photographs – and yet the more we see of her, the less recognisable she is. "Not really, because other painters my age with the same kind of success were getting that." In 2008, twenty of Cindy Sherman’s History Portraits (1989–1990) were exhibited at Skarstedt Gallery in New York City. Now, she says, she often accepts fashion and magazine commissions when she hasn’t created new work in a while and needs a burst of inspiration. "I probably went around going, 'It's OK, I'll fix it. She felt disliked? She holds up her hands in surrender. Robert Jenrick wants to keep the mob at bay. There is something profoundly uncanny about seeing Cindy Sherman in person for the first time. It ended with the Clowns series. Portrait: Nina Subin. In the nursing home [towards the end of his life], he had one of these electronic carts to get around and he'd be honking the people in their walkers and with their canes hobbling – so he was prejudiced even against his fellow old people. Sherman becomes visibly excited discussing the technical side: the process not only offers richer colour, but also allows her to exhibit the prints without glass, so the experience of viewing them ‘seems more immediate: there’s no reflection, so you’re not really aware of yourself as the viewer looking at the image.’, Untitled #204 (1989), Cindy Sherman. Cindy Sherman is far more comfortable in front of a camera than a microphone. Digital photography and editing tools have also enabled her to work more fluidly: ‘In the past I would shoot, say, two rolls of film, and then I’d take all my make-up off, get out of character, bring it to the lab, and then wait a couple of hours for it to be developed.’ If something went wrong – the image was out of focus, or the lighting was off – she’d have to start all over. I'd put on make-up every day of the year because I thought, 'Well, you never know who's going to knock on the door.' And ever since, she says, she's managed to star in her pictures without giving anything away. ‘The difference, and I think it’s a big difference,’ she says, ‘is that […] I’m trying to erase myself more than identify myself or reveal myself. I first came across Sherman's photos 20 years ago at the Whitechapel Gallery. Aspects of Minimalism at Guild Hall: Dan Flavin's Neons and More. In a way, she says, that is her skill as a photographer – the ability to recreate things she has seen. 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