The complete series of Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills, a landmark body of photographs created from 1977 to 1980, will be shown in Europe for the first time this year at two venues: the Center for Contemporary Art-Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, and the Ludwig Museum Budapest-Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest. Widely regarded as one of the most original and influential achievements in the art of the past two decades, the photographs comprise a lively and imaginative catalogue of female roles derived from the movies, all played by Sherman herself. The 69 black-and-white photographs from the collection of The Museum of Modern Art have been purchased in 1995.
In each photograph, Sherman (American, b.1954) appears in a different guise: the ingenue, the sex kitten, the hardened film noir heroine, the sophisticate. Together, the pictures deftly encapsulate a fictional culture of feminity whose artificiality is made all the more salient by the viewer’s knowledge that Sherman herself plays every role. Because of the ways in which the photographs interact with one another, the series is most powerful when seen as a whole.
Sherman began the Untitled Film Stills in 1977, conceiving the first six pictures as a group for which she impersonated a single actress in various roles. The experiment soon blossomed into an expansive survey of feminine roles based loosely on film imagery from the 1940’s through the 1960’s. The series is so full of originality, wit, and intelligence that nearly two decades later its force is still fresh and its meaning still contested.
Sherman’s singular talent and sensibility crystallised popularly held concerns in American culture as a whole about the role of the mass media in our lives and about the ways in which we shape our personal identities. Later on, her photographic oeuvre turned towards the representation of horroristic and pornographic scenes, in which the artist still continues the game of disguisement. In the 90’s Sherman began to set up sceneries using now puppets as models, hiding herself completely...
Curator of the exhibition: Peter Galassi, Chief Curator, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art New York
