The forthcoming exhibition ‘Cindy Sherman – Works from the Olbricht Collection’ will be on view at me Collectors Room from 16 September 2015 and feature some 60 photographs by the artist. Including works from almost all periods of her career, the collection represents a striking survey of Cindy Sherman’s work, with the resulting exhibition having the scope and character of a retrospective.
Variously casting herself as an ingénue at the sink in black-and-white of the 1950s, a goldblonde ‘Maria Lactans’ with a vacant expression and plastic breast, or an aging upper-class beauty wearing far too much jewelry and much too much makeup, American artist Cindy Sherman is a master of masquerade. Throughout her career she has simultaneously acted as her own actress and photographer, subject and object. And yet her portraits do not represent actual personalities. Instead they paraphrase social and cultural stereotypes with the aim of deconstructing them through the prism of cinema, classical painting, or advertising.
The artist became widely known in the 1970s with her black-and-white series ‘Untitled Film Stills’, in which she embodied a range of stereotypical female figures from the 1940s and 1950s, posing in what appeared to be movie stills. There followed a string of series in colour that explored such themes as fairy tales and old-master paintings, fashion and society ladies, masks, clowns, and dolls.
Cindy Sherman, now 61, has created an unmistakable and seminal body of work that broke new ground in photography. Her artistic legacy is one of the most important oeuvres by any artist of the modern day.
Press contact:
me Collectors Room Berlin / Olbricht Foundation
Tina Volk
presse@me-berlin.com
Fon 030 860085 -114, Fax -120
Image: Cindy Sherman, Untitled # 96, 1981 © Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York
