Cindy Sherman Untitled #410 2003 © Courtesy of the Artist and Metro Pictures

Biography

Born 1954
Nationality American
Birth place Glen Ridge

Cindy Sherman first came to prominence in the late 1970s with her Untitled Film Stills, a series of black and white photographs in which Sherman adopts stereotypical female characters from classic 1950s Hollywood films and B-movies. During the 1980s Sherman continued to examine archetypal images of women, taking on the central role in her images and moving into colour photography. Shaping her own image using a range of disguises including wigs, prosthetics, make-up and costumes, she creates characters drawn from the worlds of cinema, fashion, art history and everyday life. Avoiding self-portraiture, Sherman’s photographs cross the boundary into performance art and show how identities and stereotypes can be adopted and performed.

Glossary terms

Glossary terms

Postmodernism

Late twentieth century art that includes a great variety of styles, so is hard to define but is often characterised as a reaction against the formalism perceived to dominate Modernism. In architecture, it describes a style which borrows from many different traditions and which contrasts with the clarity and simplicity of many modernist buildings.