Cindy Sherman

Growing up in Huntington, her father worked as an engineer and her mother worked as a teacher. As a child she discovered her penchant for dressing up and her preference for the bad guys she read. Later, while studying at the State University of New York at Buffalo, she developed her passion for art. After painting, Sherman began taking photographs. The "Hallwalls" exhibition was founded at this time. In 1975 and 1975 she created the photo series "Untitled A - D" and "Bus Riders". She graduated from college in 1976 and settled in New York. They represent her famous self-portraits, in which she slips into different roles through disguise and make-up and portrays different types of women. In particular, the "Untitled Film Stills" created between 1977 and 1980 made Sherman known as a photographer, self-director and disguise artist.

The photographic works in black and white show her as an actress. The artist wanted to draw attention to the role clichés of women - based on the films of the 1940s and 1950s. In 1995, the Museum of Modern Art paid more than a million dollars for it. With the photo series "History Portraits" Cindy Sherman turns to the role of women in the history of art. In real life she fills a dual role, being a model and photographer (artist) at the same time. The intentions of her works include not only the staging of one's own body, but also critical messages about identity, feminine role clichés, violence, sexuality, play and reality, ugliness and beauty, as well as the revelations of the topics addressed. Another thematic focus of her work relates to the image of the body, which she alienated for the first time in the series "Disasters" (1985 - 1989).

In these works, she herself is no longer the subject of her work, but rather a mix of repulsive materials such as prosthetic body parts or rotting food. They represent temporality and decay and are intended to evoke feelings of disgust in the viewer. For the artist, the grotesqueness of the body is based, among other things, on the alienation in the photography of models. Cindy Sherman was named one of the ten best living artists by ARTnews magazine. Today she still lives in New York. After two marriages to the video artist Michel Auder, she is dating the musician David Byrne. In 2008, a Sherman work fetched a record $2.85 million at a Christie's auction. In 2012, the Museum of Modern Art in New York showed a large-scale exhibition entitled "Cindy Sherman. A retrospective". Under the title "Feminist Avant-Garde of the 1970s from the Verbund Collection, Vienna", it was on view in 2016/17 at the Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe.

In 2016, Sherman was honored with the prestigious "Praemium Imperiale" and in 2019 she was awarded the Max Beckmann Prize. In the same year, 2019, her retrospective followed at the National Portrait Gallery (London).