MoMA’s Cindy Sherman Retrospective Survey Brings Together Over 170 Exclusive Photographs

Tracing contemporary artist Cindy Sherman's career from the mid-1970s to the present, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) brings together over 170 exclusive photographs along with the artist's in-depth presentations of her key series.

An acclaimed American artist and photographer, Cindy Sherman is known for her sustained, eloquent and provocative exploration of the construction of contemporary identity and the nature of representation, drawn from the unlimited supply of images from movies, TV, magazines, the Internet and art history.

For over 30 years, she has worked as her own model and captured herself in a range of guises and personas which are at times amusing, disturbing and distasteful.

For her pictures, Sherman has made use of various costumes, makeup, prosthetics and props to create a myriad of intriguing tableaus and characters, from screen siren to clown to aging socialite.

Of particular attention is the key series which includes the Untitled Film Stills (1977-1980), the black-and-white pictures that feature the artist in stereotypical female roles inspired by the 1950s and 1960s Hollywood, film noir and European art-house films, her ornate history portraits (1989-1990) in which the artist poses as an aristocrat, clergyman and a milkmaid in the manner of old master paintings and her larger-than-life society portraits (2008) that address the experience and representation of aging in the context of contemporary obsession with youth and status.

The exhibition will explore dominant themes throughout Sherman's career, including artifice and fiction, cinema and performance, horror and the grotesque, myth, carnival, and fairy tale and gender and class identity. Also included are Sherman's recent photographic murals (2010) which will have their American premiere at MoMA.