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CINDY SHERMAN
(American, born 1954)
Untitled (#89, Flowered Sheets), 1981
Ektacolor C print on paper
24 1/16 x 48 1/2", 28 1/8 x 52 5/8” sheet
Purchase: Gaines Challenge Fund 1982.20

Cindy Sherman was fascinated by mass media at an early age. In particular, she was drawn to the television environment of the 1960s as well as to makeup and disguise. From 1972 to 1976 she studied art at Buffalo State College, where she focused on photography; Sherman considered photography an appropriate medium for depicting the media-crazed American culture. In her pictures, she explores the photographic parallels between fact and fiction. Sherman’s work is closely related to performance art: she is her own subject and all of her photographs are self-portraits. Through costume, setting, and pose, Sherman invents scenes and personae that are vaguely familiar, as if half-remembered from movies, magazines, and television. Her themes touch on feminism, sexual role casting, and meaning through photographic representation.

Sherman rose to celebrity in the 1980s. In 1981 and 1982 she made a series of twelve color photographs inspired by skin-magazine centerfolds. Each featured large, horizontal photos of herself in preoccupied poses. In Untitled (#89, Flowered Sheets), the figure projects a vacant expression; she is awake yet not fully conscious, and she poses suggestively within the tangled sheets. In this photograph the face, normally the focus of the viewer’s attention, is deprived of its prominence and becomes an element equivalent to every other; the sheets are as “expressive” as Sherman’s facial features. By creating such deliberately ambiguous scenarios, the artist hopes to challenge the viewer’s interpretation of her photographs.