In Celebration of Cindy Sherman

Before social media and influencers, Cindy Sherman was exploring the malleability of identity. To mark her new series, Fabric Matrons, at Hauser & Wirth London, friends and admirers from Sofia Coppola to Hans Ulrich Obrist reflect on her work

When Cindy Sherman was a girl growing up in suburban Long Island, the youngest by far of five siblings, she plundered her great-grandmother’s trunk of clothes to play dress-up. Even at that age there was something off-kilter to her transformations – never princesses or fairies but grotesque monsters and old ladies in grey wigs. This year, the shape-shifting artist turned 72, with thousands of fictional personas behind her that explore identity as a fluid masquerade: her Valley girls and crime-scene corpses, film-noir blondes and macabre clowns, biker chicks and centrefold pinups are archetypes untethered from context, never quite placeable yet eerily familiar. In recent decades she has come full-circle to exploring that imaginary older woman of her childhood, interrogating the performed identities of wealthy, ageing socialites, and questioning what is considered ‘appropriate’ in women of maturing years with a needle-sharp eye: her Hollywood/Hamptons series (2000–2002) depicted a wayward cast of never-made-its with burnt-orange tans, overlined lips and ill-starred cosmetic surgeries (“I was more interested in the types of characters that fail,” she said); and in 2008, her Socialite series felt positively weighted in twilight-hour excess when it debuted two months after global markets imploded. Featuring moneyed grand dames and brittle Upper-East-Side doyennes marooned on couches with miniature dogs, their luxury labels and compression tights worn like bulletproof armour, the details were eloquent of the price paid for their status and trinkets. There was humour to the exhaustive striving, but Sherman doesn’t skewer her subjects; their loneliness, anxiety and psychological estrangement spoke above all to the violence inflicted by society’s demands.

The artist’s new series Fabric Matrons is an evolution of those earlier series, peopled with meticulously self-made creatures clinging on by their manicured fingernails in the face of merciless gravity, their arm-length gloves and pancake make-up acting like a defensive shield against social irrelevance. High-net-worth playground East Hampton supplied Sherman with the kernel of an idea: she was flicking through a glossy local magazine lying on the table of an upscale store when she came across a shoot featuring a well-known model, also 72, heavily airbrushed and dripping with jewellery. (Sherman has a house and studio in the Hamptons, the latter jostling with a collection of wigs, prosthetics, masks and make-up begun at a novelty store on Broadway in the 1980s.) With bolts of material sourced from venerable midtown-Manhattan suppliers Moon Fabrics, she made the first skirmishes into a new series of fabricated selves. Chanel soon stepped in to give Sherman the keys to their archives, sending her the maison’s 1990s jewellery and swatches of raw-edged tweed woven with leather, gold thread and sequins. Chopped and safety-pinned by the artist into voluminous caftans, knotted turbans and headscarves (shades of those inseparable East Hampton mother-daughter eccentrics Big and Little Edie in those) the fabrics are also draped over backdrops and low-slung furniture, conjuring the unsettling sensation her personas are disappearing into their backgrounds: “As we age, we become a little bit more invisible,” as Sherman has said. Her subjects dance between embracing and resisting the march of time; in some, her face is airbrushed smooth, elsewhere wrinkles are more deeply emphasised, a push and pull that feels increasingly freighted with the release of every new app filter. Give Sherman one of those and she’s bound to subvert it; in the last decade she’s posted garish, warped selfies to her Instagram, holding an uneasy mirror to the age of curated reality: “Someone showed me an app which people use to make themselves look better online,” she said. “I use it to make myself really not look better.”

Sherman has always used herself as a canvas, but her work was never intended as self-portraiture. In this latest series though, she allows there may be an element of her own processing of ageing in these draped and dissonant Fabric Matrons: “It’s gone beyond beauty,” she says. “I think it’s showing these characters’ neuroses – probably my own, and similar to many women my age.” Here, we gather friends and admirers, from Sofia Coppola to Hans Ulrich Obrist, to reflect on their favourite Sherman works and the influential legacy of the artist who once said she wished every day was Halloween.

Hans Ulrich Obrist, artistic director at Serpentine Galleries

“Sherman really anticipated a lot of current conditions. Thinking about avatars, about filters, about the multiplicity of identities, and, as she once told me, the images tell it all. I think she always resisted the homogenising, flattening of the world by insisting on multiplicity.

“I think she always resisted the homogenising, flattening of the world by insisting on multiplicity” – Hans Ulrich Obrist

“One series that always strikes me is Disasters [1986–1989]. It makes me think of Goya’s Disasters of War, and it’s also a link to horror movies. It’s very entropic that series, and as Cindy once told me, part of it might have been the feeling of insecurity about where she fit into the art world – being insecure about being popular, and the fact that all of a sudden people collected her work. She started to question it all, and that questioning, the doubt, pushed her to do these disturbing images that people wouldn’t really want to put on the wall. ‘I never wanted to make pretty pictures,’ she said to me. ‘I was just challenging the whole notion of pursuing beauty.’ With the Disasters she started to take herself gradually out of the picture – in some, she isn’t in the picture, in others she’s in the background, or a reflection. It’s a kind of a deconstruction of the figure, and she wanted to challenge all the premises in a way, find how to tell a story without depending on her own image.”

Eva Respini, curator of major MoMA 35-year retrospective Cindy Sherman

“Cindy made work about the malleability of identity before social media, before reality TV, before TikTok, before influencers, before the narcissism of our social-media age. Her sustained, eloquent, and provocative investigation into the construction of contemporary identity is drawn from the unlimited supply of images provided by movies, television, magazines, the internet, and art history. More than ever, identity is fluid, and Sherman’s work reveals and critiques the artifice of identity and how photography is complicit in its making. She addresses the anxieties of the status of the self with pictures that are frighteningly on point and direct in their appraisal of the current culture of the cultivated self. 

“More than ever, identity is fluid, and Sherman’s work reveals and critiques the artifice of identity and how photography is complicit in its making” – Eva Respini

“I keep coming back to her Untitled Film Stills (1977–1980), arguably one of the most significant bodies of work made in the 20th century. These 70 black-and-white pictures explore the stereotypes from film and look like publicity pictures made on movie sets. Taken as a whole, they read like an encyclopedic roster of female roles inspired by 1950s and 1960s Hollywood, film noir, B-movies, and European art-house films, evoking directors such as Alfred Hitchcock, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Douglas Sirk. Based on types made recognisable by Hollywood, her characters represent deeply embedded clichés (career girl, bombshell, girl on the run, vamp, housewife, and so on). Every picture stars Sherman as the protagonist and is staged, from camera angle and props to hair, make-up, poses, and facial expressions. The Stills are constructed rather than appropriated; they blur narrative, fiction, film, role-playing, and disguise. Without resorting to parody, they explore the complexity of representation in a world saturated with images and refer to the cultural filter of other images through which we see the world.”

Sofia Coppola, filmmaker and friend

“One of my prized possessions is the childhood photo of Cindy dressed up like an old lady with a grey wig. It makes me so happy. We’re all trying to get back to that moment of creativity as a kid. I love Cindy’s film series: the way she portrays a whole atmosphere and character; I’m always drawn to work about identity and female archetypes. Great artists are timeless, and Cindy’s work has posing, how you present yourself and are looked at, which is such a big part of our culture today.”

Yana Peel, president of art, culture and heritage at Chanel

“With Fabric Matrons, Sherman continues to advance the conversation by portraying an aspect of womanhood that has too often remained unseen: ageing. Her new portraits are fearless in their honesty – some blunt, some beautiful, all alluring. The portfolio reveals an exceptional emotional range, connecting women by illuminating both their individuality and the universality of our experience. The inclusion of Chanel fabrics and costume jewellery from the House archive as a catalyst for creation sparks a tête-à-tête with Gabrielle Chanel, whose own life and work championed women’s freedom to inhabit many identities. Famously, she stated: ‘My life didn’t please me, so I created my life.’”

Cindy Sherman is open at Hauser & Wirth, London, until 23 December