CINDY SHERMAN,
THE WOMAN OF A THOUSAND FACES
An alien, an illusionist, a hybrid – this 66-year-old American artist remains a mystery to the viewer that we are. At the same time photographer and model, make-up artist and hairdresser, stylist and designer, Cindy Sherman stages herself through mind-boggling portraits, which border on impropriety.
She cheerfully plays with convention in every way, using her body as a work of art, like a chameleon thirsty for change.
The Louis Vuitton Foundation is devoting an exhibition to him – the second in France since his last solo exhibition at the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume in 2006 in Paris – bringing together 300 of his compositions, produced between 1975 and today.
Unclassifiable and unique, Cindy Sherman daringly mixes genres and reveals without taboos a clownish, colorful, sometimes chaotic universe.
His works question how art and pop culture influence our identities, when people are – wrongly – put in boxes, which they struggle to get rid of. Her perfomance creates disorder, especially when she skillfully plays with double senses – especially that of the clown, both playful and frightening. Cindy Sherman unashamedly offers us a distorting mirror, in which she shows a sick society, which disguises itself in artifices and appearances. Like Woody Allen in his film “Celebrity”, she denounces the success of inconsistency at the expense of scholarship.
