Cindy Sherman

Traditional portraiture in either painting or photography succeeds to the degree that the viewer experiences recognition and some empathy with the sitter. Through much of her career, Cindy Sherman’s work (American, born 1954) has repositioned portraiture and photography outside empathetic realms. Exploring visual tropes of the female body and changing notions of women’s identity in society, her work has established Sherman as the preeminent conceptual photographer of her generation. The exhibition presents recent works which illuminate her continuing exploration of photographic form and the role of signs and signifiers of identity in suggesting narrative structure. Sherman has used green screen technology to record her characters and united them with her digitally manipulated landscape photographs to create large-scale prints and a 24-foot-long wall mural.

New York-based Sherman has exhibited internationally since the early 1980s and has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship in 1995. Her work was most recently featured in a major traveling retrospective organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

This exhibition is part of an ongoing series of contemporary art exhibitions organized by Bruce Guenther, The Robert and Mercedes Eichholz Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, and supported in part by the Miller Meigs Endowment for the Contemporary Arts and the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation.