Cindy Sherman’s New Portraits Are Weird

Taylor Dafoe January 25, 2024 ShareShare This Article

A press release for Cindy Sherman’s new self-titled show at Hauser & Wirth’s Wooster Street location goes out of its way to draw a connection to the artist’s past. This exhibition, the description explains, “marks Sherman’s return to the historic SoHo district where, in the late 1970s, she debuted her now iconic Untitled Film Stills at the non-profit Artists Space.”

We probably didn’t need the reminder. For a long time now, it’s been hard not to have the Film Stills in the back of one’s mind when taking in newer examples of the artist’s work. That early series—for which the artist photographed herself as a housewife, femme fatale, and other stock characters of old black-and-white films—has taken on a lot of weight in the 40-plus years since it debuted, and its achievements have only come into sharper focus as her pictures have grown weirder and more complex in the decades since.

Installation view of "Cindy Sherman" at Hauser & Wirth New York, 18 January 18 -March 6, 2024. © Cindy Sherman. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Sarah Muehlbauer.

Installation view of “Cindy Sherman” at Hauser & Wirth New York. © Cindy Sherman. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Sarah Muehlbauer.

The layered pictures that make up her current Hauser & Wirth exhibition definitely fall into the “weird” category, but they’re not weighed down by the past. Each comprises an amalgam of the artist’s own facial features collaged—Mr. Potato Head-style—atop studio portraits of herself caked in makeup and wearing various wigs.

Who Sherman is trying to evoke isn’t totally clear, certainly not to the extent of past series, where she assumed the identities of specific historical figures (the aristocrats of Old Master paintings, say) or archetypes (socialites, “men“). But as with those efforts, there is an element of self-portraiture in the mix of these new pictures, too. No matter how many elaborate disguises Sherman puts on, she is, to some extent, always photographing herself.

Even so, the veil of performance is particularly thin here. No one will mistake the show’s many Frankenstein-ed faces for the artist’s own, but the parts of Sherman we see in snippets are tender, vulnerable. On view—plainly, and in rich digital detail—is the 70-year-old artist’s aging skin, her pores, her creases.

Cindy Sherman, <i>Untitled #646</i> (2023). © Cindy Sherman. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.

Cindy Sherman, Untitled #646 (2023). © Cindy Sherman. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.

“I’m not going to go into this aging process silently or happily,” she said in a New York Times profile published this week. “I feel like I’m preparing myself for it… This is what you’re going to get, so get used to it. It’s coming. It’s hanging over all of our heads.”

The get-ups and collages turn the subjects of Sherman’s new portraits into caricatures, but she knows that time has a way of doing that too, turning us all into distorted, fractured reflections of our past selves. Sherman may no longer look like the ingenue from the Film Stills, but she is every bit the artist she was back then—and a lot more.

See more images from Sherman’s new body of work below.