Cindy Sherman’s Grotesque Digital Creations

Cindy Sherman, the grande dame of the Pictures Generation, has a new show up at Hauser & Wirth’s recently opened space in SoHo—a collection of wacky, digitally collaged character studies, which continue her multipronged expedition into the outer realms of persona building, artifice, and the fun-house world of media images. The gallery bills it as a neighborhood homecoming of sorts, describing in a press release how Sherman mounted the New York début of her epochal series “Untitled Film Stills” in SoHo, at the nonprofit gallery Artists Space, some forty-odd years ago. The pedant in me is compelled to note that Artists Space was in Tribeca at the time of the 1978 exhibition, having moved from Wooster Street down to Hudson Street the year before, but I grant that it was within spitting distance of SoHo if you were a very good spitter. Regardless, just as both of those neighborhoods have come a long way from their incarnations as magnets for rowdy bohemians, Sherman, who just celebrated her seventieth birthday, is far removed from her days as an upstart artist crafting pastiches of imperilled ingénues in noirish faux films. In some ways, the new show is about the inexorable pull of time, the lamentable fact of aging. The characters in it—which, of course, are all Sherman in disguise—are women in their senescence, a state Sherman exaggerates to cartoonish effect, using pancaked makeup and Cubistic digital-collage techniques that can make the faces of her imaginary subjects puffy, pinched, and simply strange. In one particularly on-the-nose work, Sherman has blacked up her nostrils and painted her eyes so that she resembles a cross between a weeping Tammy Faye Bakker and a grimacing skull. This kind of heavy digital intervention is a first for Sherman in a gallery context, but for years she has maintained what amounts to a digital sketchbook on her Instagram account, where, to some four hundred thousand followers, she shares pictures of her face that have been mangled and distorted with various filters and A.I. algorithms. For the works at Hauser & Wirth, she’s traded the stock programs for […]

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