Cindy Sherman

Published to accompany exhibition held at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2/11/97 - 1/2/98; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 28/2/98 - 31/5/98.

How does someone become a ground-breaking artist? Does it start when you're very little and discover that you like to play dress up? Does it happen when you're ten years old and someone gives you a Polaroid camera for Christmas? Maybe it begins in college, when you're finally on your own to discover the world as you see it for the first time. Looking at the life of legendary photographer Cindy Sherman, Jan Greenberg and Sandra Jordan have created an unconventional biography, that much like Cindy Sherman's famous photographs, has something a little more meaningful under the surface. Infusing the narrative with Sherman's photographs, as well as children's first impressions of the photographs, this is a biography that goes beyond birth, middle age, and later life. It's a look at how we look at art.

"The first career survey to explore the full range of the artist's [Cindy Sherman's] photographic series through the critical lens of cinema. Featuring more than 130 illustrations, ... it explores the artist's use of cinematic artifice across almost 40 years of work." --back cover.

"An in-depth look at the disturbing and abject sides of the American photo artist's oeuvre. Throughout her career, Cindy Sherman (*1954 in Glen Ridge, New Jersey) has been interested in the derailed and deviant sides of human nature, noticeable both in her selection of subject matter (fairytales, disasters, sex, horror, and surrealism) and in her disquieting interpretations of well-established photographic genres, such as film stills, fashion photography, and society portraiture. This richly illustrated publication seeks to highlight and acknowledge these aspects of her work based on selected examples and accompanied by texts by well-known authors, filmmakers, and artists who likewise deal with the grotesque, the uncanny, and the extraordinary in their artistic practice."--Publisher's website.

"For more than thirty years now, Cindy Sherman has been visualizing a whole gamut of role models and female identities. ... Contrary to popular belief, the famous Untitled Film Stills (1978-80) are not her earliest works, but rather those photographs she took as a student in Buffalo between 1975 and 1977. During those years, Sherman made playing with disguises her artistic concept, producing numerous previously unknown photographs that unite a striking number of theatrical elements. Using a variety of wigs, make-up, mimicry, gestures, expressions, and costumes, Sherman reveals different social identities by playing different roles. Gabriele Schor, director of the SAMMLUNG VERBUND, has performed a scholarly assessment of the conceptual beginnings of her oeuvre and is now publishing a catalogue raisonné of her early work."--Publisher description.

British painter Glenn Brown's fourth exhibition at Galerie Max Hetzler in Berlin took place at the gallery's temporary space: a small, well-lit apartment in the Charlottenburg district. This superbly produced, oversized publication records both the works and their intimate installation with extraordinary gatefolds that scrutinize the sensuous surfaces of Brown's paintings and sculptures. Full of technical virtuosity and grotesque exaggeration, these works based on reproductions of historical art include a traditional flower painting mutated into bouquets of orifices; a portrait of an old man in sickly colors; fragmented female torsos; and sculptures smothered in thick chunks of oil paint. The extraordinary tension between relish and repulsion achieved by the sculptures can provoke extreme reactions of delight or fascination, as this volume reveals.

"Cindy Sherman's work is structured into series, the best known of which are History Portraits and Untitled Film Stills (1977-1980), which led to Cindy Sherman's artistic breakthrough. In History Portraits, the artist carries out radical transformations of Old Master paintings. Using make-up, cloth drapes, and prostheses, she photographs herself in the poses in which the Old Masters portrayed women. Christa Schneider presents an art-historical analysis of the History Portraits. Identifying a clear model for every single portrait (e.g. Botticelli and Rubens, François Boucher and Jacques-Louis David), she reveals Sherman's extremely precise and enigmatic method of working in which the artistic media employed by Sherman--photography and acting--are surprisingly compatible with painting."

This book, which accompanies a major exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, considers Cindy Sherman's oeuvre through the lens of portraiture. Featuring key examples of her work - from her earliest photographs through to her most recent - it explores the mercurial relationship between appearance and realityCindy Sherman is among the most influential artists of her generation. Using herself as model, wearing a range of costumes and portraying herself in invented situations, she interrogates the imagery employed by the mass media, po pular culture and fine art. Television, advertising, magazines, fashion and Old Master paintings all form part of her visual language.Whether using make-up, costumes, props and prosthetics to manipulate her own appearance, or devising elaborate tableaux, her entire body of 40 years' work constitutes a highly distinctive response to contemporary and earlier culture, whose stylistic tropes she appropriates and quotes. This book will explore the rich cultural sources that Sherman plunders in creating provocative and ambiguous images that lead us to question the things we see.Sherman's work is surveyed through two related themes. Examining Sherman's art within the context of portraiture it explores the way that identity is constructed from appearance. It also considers the nature of Sherman's involvement with a range of styles by positioning her work in the context of the pre-existing imagery that she appropriates.