Cindy Sherman was looking for inspiration in the Spence Chapin Thrift Shop in New York last month, it looked like a satin wedding dress. "It's Arnold Scaasi," said the saleslady, as Sherman took a detour through the dress. Unzip the back, the officer showed a series of labels, which became the year - 1992 - and another with the names of the bride to be. "There has never been used," he added. According to history, when the dress was finished, the bride decided that she did not like.
Sherman was skeptical. Is this really what happens, or is it just the cover story for a bride abandoned? Do not ask for more.
The sense of mystery and seduction viewers uneasy feeling similar emotions when they see one of Sherman's photographs elliptical. Movie star, Valley Girl, the woman frustrated angry that celebrities, a courtesan of the Renaissance, the clown that threat, and the Roman god Bacchus: As part of his remarkable 35-year career, has starred in hundreds characters. Some images are very short, in others, in essence, as Sherman said, set "are clues that tell a story."
"None of the characters are me," she says, sipping a drink at a cafe near the studio this afternoon. "You are nothing more than me. If you are too close to me, seems to be rejected."
This afternoon, Sherman, 58, was expelled from his home in his historical retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, which opened on Sunday to discuss and includes over 170 photographs. Use without makeup, with leggings and sneakers, and a tweed hat, carefully hid his helmet, looked ordinary, only the famous artist whose fans include Lady Gaga, Elton John, who collects his work, and Madonna, a view supported by Sherman "Untitled Film Stills" at the Museum of Modern Art in 1997.
"The 'most influential
While preparing for his retrospective - the first in the United States in nearly 14 years - pushing to try something new. Lately, she has to create a family portrait where each member would play thought.
"It is without doubt one of the most influential artists of our time," said Eva Respini, associate curator of photography at MoMA, which has in the past two years, the organization back Sherman. "She is still the central themes of our visual culture. Makeover in this world of celebrity, reality TV and YouTube, here is an artist whose different modes of representation appear to be now a real, if they were made. "
Philippe Segalot, a Manhattan dealer who bought his first work of Sherman for his own collection in 80 years, said: "I've always been amazed at how they could take what seems like a simple idea, and reinvent. Cindy is one of the few artists who are still big in their careers. "High in the 1950s among the first artists to come of age in the era of mass media and mass television, Sherman is part of" Image Generation "The works that do pop and conceptualism to combine. This was the first time in 70 years thanks to her "Untitled Film Stills," inspired fictional portraits of girlie magazines and movies of care. She and artists like Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, Louise Lawler, Laurie Simmons were considered feminine archetypes and gender issues in a way that no one had done before. But it was not until 1981, when she inspired his "Central", a series of portraits from photos in Playboy - but with the women dressed, and convey a complex range of emotions - that his career really began.
Until 1982, Sherman was the subject of an exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and at Documenta 7 in Kassel, Germany, and the Venice Biennale. Five years later he traveled, the retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art was. And in 1995, she received a MacArthur Fellowship.
His "Untitled Film Stills", which has developed the film voluntarily hotter than natural chemicals that seem cheap grain cracks and the gifts are now as benchmarks century fine art of the 20th century into account. (In 1995, MoMA bought a game for the reported $ 1 million, a high price at the time.) However, dozens of photos of his long career, despite the proliferation of digital photography and Photoshop have supported.
Commercially, is often credited with taking pictures of a neighborhood, and put on the same level of the enterprise of art like painting and sculpture. In May 2011, Segalot, bidding on behalf of a customer has bought a painting from 1981, which is presented as a girl. For six months, was the most expensive painting sold at auction, such as $ 3.9 million at Christie.
Sherman began painting at school at the State University of Buffalo. "I was good for a copy, but I had not really thought about what I wanted to do with the painting," he said. "Then I thought, 'Why am I lost my copy tedious things if I could use a camera?"
One of his first tasks in a photography class was a little too hard for them was to face. "I took a series of me naked before the camera," he said. "I have one or two of this series, and this is where I started myself, but at the same time, not only as an artistic practice for therapy or something. I turn my face with makeup different characters to distribute one-time" .
He was the artist Robert Longo, and suggested that is documented in these suits. And after two to New York in 1977, Sherman often occur at sites of costumes.
And out over a decade, since 1985, took their pictures. It shows a series macabre still life of food, vomit, blood and mildew, another begins anatomically correct body parts in the rare medical poses. She said she has created many images in difficult times in their lives, as if angered by male artists whose career seemed to lose weight more easily than you, or when it was the middle of a divorce from the French filmmaker Michel Auder to end their 15 year marriage.
None of these images were a commercial success as her "Untitled Film Stills," or even "Portraits of History." The historical series (1989-1990) were pictures of her dressed as characters from old masters like Titian, Holbein, and Caravaggio.
Photoshop
The MoMA exhibition, there will be new photos to the American public, which changed its face digitally. "I have no makeup," he said. "It was a little all the subtle changes with Photoshop to make each character a different look."
In some eyes the largest and spread further out, in others, he formed his new flac chin and cheek. "It's amazing how easy it is to make changes," he said.
Recently he has been thinking of the big producers, murals printed on a kind of contact paper. She had the idea, he said, after watching "a series of male artists were invited to the opportunity to do a show somewhere, and she had just filled an entire wall painting, it's just this huge thing."
He added: "I thought, how demanding it is clear to me that it was not too many artists feel that way .."
When the visitor walks up the stairs at MoMA, which are available in 8 feet high amid the bucolic images of a black and white wrapped Sherman was shot in Central Park. "It's like walking in the countries of Cindy" Respini said on a recent afternoon, as supervising workers was contact paper to the walls of the museum.
Sherman appears in another bewildering array of characters: a circus juggler, a woman wearing a full body suit with pointed breasts, an elderly woman in a long red wedding dresses.
"You think you know," said Respini. "But really, the more you look, the. More complex and darker than it appears. The same could be said of a woman like Cindy so sweet and kind have a bad imagination, inventing these fabulous characters, and yet still retains? "......
