Cindy Sherman. Alicia Chillida

Cindy Sherman was born in Glen Ridge, New Jersey (United States). After graduating from the State University College of Buffalo with a degree in Art, she moved to New York where she has lived and worked since 1974. Sherman's photographic work sets off a chain of associations of ideas; the photographs "read" like the different elements in the plot of a story. The disgusting, obscene and horrible nature of the latest series confronts the viewer with his own fears and traumas.

During the presentation of the complete series Film Stills, in a statement by the MOMA in New York, Peter Galassi, Director of the Department of Photography, said: "The way in which the images speak to each other makes the totality of the work far greater than the sum of the individual photos. This applies not only to the Film Stills but also to the connection between this series and the other three that preside over the exhibition.

Untitled stills, (Untitled film stills), 1977-1980, is the series that gave Cindy Sherman her international recognition. The black and white series shows Sherman in the cliché of woman: in the role of housewife, sex object, diva or self-confident businesswoman, etc... The stereotypes that women assume and are given. The Disgusting images, (Disgust pictures) are nightmarish depictions: garbage, rotten food and vomit... treated in very pale colors, they evoke the suggestive nostalgia of the Film Stills.

In a similar tone, the images referring to sex are represented in large-format color photos: dislocated dolls in various poses, approaches to a world of "hardcore porn" and perverse violence. The grotesque masks in the Horror images, (Horror pictures) are inspired in large part by the brutal humor of the movie The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. In her latest series, Sherman returns to the self-portrait, but now in a highly exaggerated and theatrical form, in which she evokes her appearance as a torn cry coming from her earlier work, the Film Stills.

Sherman's creative principle is, in the words of art critic Peter Schjeldahl, "a dialectic between photography and murder", which he materializes in images of "an unerring psychological intensity", based on the structural mastery of cinematographic and pictorial instruments.

The artist is familiar with Norman Bryson's definition of the postmodern subject: "a weaving of quotations, a complete interweaving of image and identity". From this point of view, appropriationism and recontextualization can be identified as two of the main resources with which she creates her photographic fictions, as revealed by the series Untitled Film Stills.

Sherman uses the costume and the mask as a vehicle to enter into the intimate lives of characters that she herself creates, to make visible the perversions and fears that define them, their non-public side. Although she does not consider herself a feminist artist, Sherman interprets, reveals and denounces through reconstruction the roles that the dominant male culture has historically assigned to women and on which they build their identity.