Cindy Sherman

Life and formation

Cynthia Morris Sherman was born in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, in 1954, the youngest of five children, and grew up in Huntington on Long Island. She enrolled in the visual arts department at Buffalo State University to study painting and gave it up in frustration, saying later that she had been meticulously copying other art and realised she could use a camera and put her time into an idea instead. She had already begun dressing as invented characters assembled from thrift store clothing. In Buffalo she met Robert Longo, who encouraged her to record the process of dolling up for parties, and with him and others she founded Hallwalls, an artists' space. She encountered the photo based conceptual work of Hannah Wilke, Eleanor Antin and Adrian Piper there, and is counted with Laurie Simmons, Louise Lawler and Barbara Kruger as part of the Pictures Generation.

The work

Sherman works in series and shoots alone in the studio, acting as author, director, make up artist, hairstylist, wardrobe mistress and model at once. She insists the results are not self portraits. When she looks at the pictures she never sees herself, and has described the aim as obliterating herself inside the characters rather than revealing anything. The breakthrough was the Untitled Film Stills, a group of black and white photographs in which she appears as the kind of actress found in film noir and Italian neorealism, modest in scale and deliberately untitled so that the stories stay ambiguous. The Museum of Modern Art bought the series outright. Everything after it works by appropriating another visual form and turning it inside out: the magazine centerfold, the fashion photograph, the old master portrait, the soft core sex image. Rear Screen Projections brought colour and larger formats. Fairy Tales and Disasters introduced prostheses and mannequins and a deliberate ugliness. The Sex Pictures removed her from the frame altogether in favour of medical dummies. The History Portraits restaged European portrait painting. The society portraits of the late two thousands show wealthy older women in opulent settings, digitally aged, conveying loneliness under the jewellery. She has also worked in fashion for Comme des Garcons, Marc Jacobs and Balenciaga, directed the feature Office Killer, and more recently shown self portraits woven as tapestries from altered phone images.

Exhibitions

Her first solo show in New York was at The Kitchen in 1980, and when Metro Pictures opened later that year her photographs were its inaugural exhibition. Solo shows followed at the Stedelijk in Amsterdam and the Venice Biennale in 1982, the Whitney in 1987, Kunsthalle Basel in 1991 and the Hirshhorn in 1995. Travelling retrospectives were organised by the Boymans van Beuningen in Rotterdam in 1996 and jointly by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the Museum of Modern Art in 1997. She showed at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1998, at the Serpentine Gallery in London in 2003 and at the Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin in 2007. The Metropolitan included her in The Pictures Generation in 2009, the Museum of Modern Art gave her a full survey of more than one hundred and seventy photographs in 2012, and the National Portrait Gallery in London mounted a retrospective in 2019. Her first exhibition in Greece opened at the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens in 2024.

What reaches the saleroom

The canonical prints sit at the very top of the photographic market and have made seven figure sums in dollars. Almost everything a general sale sees, however, is an editioned print published for an institution, and those are a different register entirely. Untitled with the subtitle Self Portrait with Sun Tan, a chromogenic print signed, dated and numbered from an edition of three hundred and fifty, published by the Serpentine Gallery on the occasion of her London retrospective, made GBP 2,550 at Bonhams in London in 2022. The sheet LLB Auction sold belongs to exactly this family. It comes from the set of three previously unreleased Head Shots photographs that Sherman released through Avant Arte in 2025 in support of the Museum of Cycladic Art, printed on Fuji Crystal Archive paper, with one signature to the reverse per trio. For any such lot the questions are the publisher, the edition size and whether the signature is present.