Cindy Sherman’s unsettling, fragmented portraits go on show in New York

Cindy Sherman has long been fascinated with the concept of a persona, dismantling archetypes with unflinching portraits. Evocations of familiar faces – Madonna with child, ageing socialites, film stars – become unfamiliar through Sherman’s lens, distorted with props, filters and digital manipulations.

Cindy Sherman at Hauser & Wirth New York

It is this latter method to which Sherman has returned for a new exhibition at Hauser & Wirth New York, with 30 new works playfully reconstructing the parameters of the face. Sherman uses her own features for the puzzle-like works, collaging the elements of her face to create brand-new characters. By inhabiting the role of both subject and artist, Sherman shifts the dynamic away from the traditional relationship with the sitter, sidestepping its discomfiting voyeurism.

In the clean works – Sherman has stripped back all external detailing, letting the heads take centre stage – the fictional subjects adopt the familiar expression of a sitter, their quiet endurance emphasised by the clearly inhuman contours of their faces. Sherman has left in the marks of collage, with the distortions revealing the hand-cutting and colouring of her methods, in a nod to the complicated nature of identity and the disparity between who we are and how we present ourselves. 

Like her use of make-up, prosthetics and wigs, the digital manipulations here create new characters out of familiar forms – in this case her own – to illustrate the layers that go into an identity, the unsettling results of which are explored in these new works. 

‘Cindy Sherman’, at Hauser & Wirth New York, from 18 January – 16 March 2024

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