p Post Colonial Gold Conversation piece 

Summary

Cindy Sherman is one of the most important artists of our time because she reveals that the image of woman is never neutral. Using her own body as a model, yet without placing herself autobiographically at the centre, she investigates how femininity is constructed through film, advertising, art history, fashion, make-up, costume and pose.

In her iconic series, such as Untitled Film Stills, Centerfolds, History Portraits and Society Portraits, Sherman appears again and again in a different role: housewife, film heroine, victim, aristocrat, society woman, clown or historical figure. Yet the work is never about one specific character. It is about the system behind the image: who is looking, who is being looked at, and which expectations are projected onto the female body.

Sherman makes visible how femininity often functions as a mask. Her strength lies not in tearing that mask away, but in showing how convincing, seductive and restrictive it can be. In doing so, she teaches us to look more critically at images of women — in art, film, fashion, media and our own time.

Work by Cindy Sherman is included in the immersive exhibition 100 Women in Art You Need to Know: five centuries of art and art history that rewrites the role of women in the history of art. 

Cindy Sherman: Woman as Mask, Image and Projection

Cindy Sherman is one of the defining artists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Her importance does not lie in the fact that she repeatedly photographs herself, but in how she uses her own body as material to make an entire visual system visible: the ways in which women are looked at, coded, desired, feared, reduced and fixed into roles.

At first glance, her work may seem easy to describe. Sherman dresses up, applies make-up, constructs a setting, assumes a pose and photographs herself. Yet the longer one looks, the clearer it becomes that the work is never simply about Cindy Sherman as a person. She uses her own body not to reveal herself, but to expose how images of women are produced.

Her oeuvre is not an autobiography. It is an archive of masks.

That is precisely why Sherman remains so urgent. Long before social media, selfies, filters, cosmetic optimisation and algorithmic beauty came to define contemporary visual culture, she understood that a woman rarely appears in an image neutrally. A face is never just a face. A dress is never just a dress. A gaze, a wig, a lip, a posture or a gesture always carries a history of expectation.

An Artist Who Does Not Depict Herself

Cindy Sherman was born in 1954 in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, and grew up on Long Island. She studied at Buffalo State College, where she initially focused on painting before turning to photography. That shift was decisive. Photography allowed her to work directly with the image culture of her time: film, television, advertising, magazines, fashion and art history.

From the beginning, Sherman did not make classical self-portraits. She used herself as a model, but not as the subject. That distinction is crucial. She appears in her photographs, but she does not tell her personal story. Instead, she disappears behind roles, clichés and projections.

In her studio, Sherman becomes director, actress, stylist, costume designer, make-up artist, set builder and photographer at once. Each image is a scene. Each character seems to come from somewhere: a B-movie, a soap opera, a glamour magazine, a horror story, a Renaissance portrait or a nightmare. The viewer recognises something, but can never fully place it.

That is where the unease begins. Sherman does not show us existing women. She shows us images of femininity that already live in our heads.

Untitled Film Stills: The Masterpiece of the Constructed Woman

Sherman’s most iconic work is Untitled Film Stills (1977–1980), a series of black-and-white photographs made shortly after she moved to New York. In these works, Sherman photographs herself in a range of female roles that evoke Hollywood cinema of the 1950s and 1960s, film noir, B-movies and European arthouse film.

The women in this series seem familiar: the lonely housewife, the young secretary, the woman on the run, the vulnerable ingénue, the seductress, the girl in the countryside, the woman in the city who suddenly seems to realise she is being watched. Yet these are not actual film stills. There is no film from which these images were taken. Sherman creates fictional images that feel like memories of films we have never seen.

That is the brilliance of the series. Sherman does not imitate one actress or one character. She imitates an image system. She shows how femininity is constructed through visual codes: lighting, framing, clothing, hairstyle, gaze, posture and implied threat. The woman in the image always seems to be in the middle of a story, but that story remains withheld.

The viewer has to complete it. In doing so, the viewer becomes visible as a co-producer of meaning.

Untitled Film Stills is held as a complete series in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, which acquired the full group in 1995. It is now considered one of the key works of post-war photography and a landmark within the art of the Pictures Generation.

One of the best-known images from the series is Untitled Film Still #21 (1978). Sherman appears as a young woman in an urban environment, often read as a “career girl” caught within a Hitchcock-like scene. A print is held in the collection of MoMA; The Metropolitan Museum of Art also owns a print of the work.

Untitled #96: Desire Made Unstable

After Untitled Film Stills, Sherman made a series of colour photographs in the early 1980s known as the Centerfolds or Horizontals. These works refer to the format of magazine centerfolds: horizontal images, intimate scale, close relation to the body. Yet Sherman does not use this visual language to make eroticism easily consumable. She makes it uncomfortable.

One of the most famous works from this series is Untitled #96 (1981). Sherman lies on the floor, dressed in an orange sweater and skirt, with an ambiguous, almost absent gaze. She holds a small piece of paper. The image appears vulnerable, but not passive. It appears seductive, but also disturbed. The viewer is placed in a position where looking no longer feels innocent.

That is Sherman’s strength. She takes a visual format historically associated with availability and desire, and transforms it into psychological tension. The figure does not surrender to the gaze. She withholds something.

Untitled #96 is in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art in New York and is widely regarded as one of Sherman’s most important photographs from the 1980s.

Untitled #93: The Scene After the Story

Another important work from the same period is Untitled #93 (1981). Sherman lies in bed, blonde hair around her face, a dark blanket pulled close to her body. The image is unsettling because it does not offer a stable narrative. Has she just woken up? Is she frightened? Exhausted? Confused? Has something happened? Or is the viewer projecting that possibility onto the image?

Sherman has resisted fixed interpretation, and that resistance is central to the work. The photograph activates the viewer’s assumptions. It shows how quickly a female body in an image is read through narratives of vulnerability, sexuality, threat or guilt.

Untitled #93 is in the collection of The Art Institute of Chicago. The work belongs to the broader group of Centerfolds, in which Sherman explores the tension between desire, media imagery and psychological discomfort.

Untitled #153: The Body After Glamour

By the mid-1980s, Sherman’s work became darker, more bodily and more grotesque. In Untitled #153 (1985), she presents herself as a muddy, almost lifeless figure in a landscape. Very little remains of the cinematic glamour of her earlier work. The body is no longer organised as an object of desire. It becomes disturbed, vulnerable, threatening and abject.

With works such as this, Sherman expands her investigation. The question is no longer only how stereotypes from film and media construct femininity, but how fear, violence, fairy tales, horror, death and disgust also shape the cultural image of woman.

Untitled #153 is in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art in New York.

History Portraits: Art History as a Dressing Room

In the late 1980s, Sherman made her celebrated History Portraits. In this series, she uses the visual language of Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo and neoclassical portraiture. She appears as Madonna, aristocratic lady, courtesan, saint, heroine or historical figure. Yet her masquerade is never seamless. The prosthetics, false breasts, costumes and make-up are often too visible, too theatrical, too artificial.

That visibility is the point. Sherman presents art history as a system of roles. Even the elevated portraits preserved in museums are revealed as constructions, in which power, status, gender and beauty are carefully staged.

An important work from this series is Untitled #228 (1990), in which Sherman appears as Judith, the biblical heroine who beheads Holofernes. Judith has been depicted countless times in art history, often by male artists. Sherman takes up that tradition, but makes it unstable and theatrical. The heroine does not become a smooth icon. She becomes an image in which power, violence, femininity and art history collide.

Untitled #228 is held in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Society Portraits: Wealth, Age and the Fear of Decline

In 2008, Sherman made her Society Portraits, a series of large colour portraits of fictional women from upper social circles. These women appear in expensive clothing, against luxurious backgrounds, often with signs of cosmetic intervention, tense expressions and carefully constructed dignity.

The images are painful because they do not simply mock. Sherman is sharp, sometimes cruel, but never superficial. She shows how women who age within a culture of status, visibility and youth can become trapped by an impossible demand: to remain visible, remain beautiful, appear wealthy, stay composed and not disappear.

In this series, beauty becomes a battlefield. The faces are not only faces, but maps of social pressure. Wrinkles, tightened skin, make-up, jewellery, clothing and background together form an image of class, fear and desire.

Untitled #468 (2008), one of the works from this series, is in the collection of The Broad in Los Angeles. The work exemplifies Sherman’s ability to show the self as a construction shaped by class, performance, ageing and social expectation.

Why Cindy Sherman Is Art Historically Important

Cindy Sherman changed the meaning of the photographic self-portrait. She showed that a self-portrait does not have to reveal the artist’s inner life. It can also function as a critical instrument for examining culture.

Her work is important because it demonstrates that identity does not simply “exist”; it appears through codes. Gender, class, age, beauty, power and vulnerability are made visible through images we already recognise. Sherman takes those images apart by performing them again.

She belongs to a generation of artists who, in the 1970s and 1980s, looked critically at mass media, advertising, film and popular culture. Yet her work remains powerful because it is not dryly theoretical. It is seductive, witty, uncomfortable, grotesque and, at times, deeply disturbing. One looks first because the image is attractive or recognisable. Then one realises that the image is looking back.

Sherman shows that femininity is not a fixed essence, but a role that is constantly produced. By changing herself again and again, she shows that the “self” does not disappear, but becomes mobile. Her work does not say: behind the mask is the real woman. It says: look how powerful the mask is.

Why Her Work Is Still Urgent Today

Today, faces are constantly made, edited, circulated and monetised. People present themselves through cameras, filters, profiles, avatars and social platforms. The idea that identity is constructed through images has become everyday reality. Sherman saw this much earlier.

That is why her work may be even more relevant now than when it was first made. She shows that image-making is never innocent. Every image carries expectations. Every image of a woman activates old roles. Every mask can liberate, but it can also imprison.

Cindy Sherman teaches us to look more critically. Not only at art, but at all the images in which women appear: in film, fashion, advertising, news, social media and art history. She shows that the question is not only who appears in the image, but how that image is made, which codes direct it, and what role the viewer plays within it.

Her art makes the gaze responsible.

That is where her lasting power lies. Cindy Sherman presents woman not as a fixed image, but as projection, construction and mask. She takes on the roles culture has prepared for women and makes them crack from within.

Sources

The Museum of Modern Art, New York — Cindy Sherman artist page.

The Museum of Modern Art, New York — Cindy Sherman: The Complete Untitled Film Stills, information on the complete series of 69 black-and-white photographs, acquired by MoMA in 1995.

The Museum of Modern Art, New York — collection pages for Untitled Film Still #21, Untitled #96, Untitled #153 and Untitled #228.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York — collection page for Untitled Film Still #21.

The Art Institute of Chicago — collection page for Untitled #93.

The Broad, Los Angeles — collection page for Untitled #468 and information on the Society Portraits.

Encyclopaedia Britannica — Cindy Sherman biography.

Suggested tags

Cindy Sherman; Female Image; Constructed Femininity; Femininity as Mask; Identity; The Gaze; Representation; Film Stills; Art History; Fashion; Media; Women in Art; Feminist Art; Contemporary Art; Visual Culture.