| Throughout the thirty years Cindy Sherman has worked as an artist, she has almost exclusively used herself as a model for her works. Sherman stages, directs and photographs herself in constantly changing disguises which are not, however, self-portraits. Each picture reflects a new identity taken from the mass media's stereotyped views of women. She always works in series and never gives her works titles. Instead they are given a number.
Sherman manipulates her own body by means of make-up, clothes and artificial body parts, and stages herself as various figures that she invents or re-invents, after which she photographs herself in her studio. Sherman's idiom varies from the amusing and humorous through the shrill to the brutal. Each series has its theme and several variations on the same idiom. Her whole idea with the stagings is to explore the cultural and social stereotypes as they are presented for example in magazines, advertisements, films and classic paintings.
In her staged works Sherman questions the male gaze at women; women too look at themselves from a male point of view, as the only point of view that exists in a patriarchal society. The repetition and variation take the form of a subtle analysis of female identity. (Louisiana Museum of Modern Art)
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