Cindy Sherman

From the 2003 Serpentine Gallery retrospective of Cindy Sherman's many 'characters' and 'portraits' from the last three decades. From the black and white 'Actress' series, to her late '70's film stills, and her most recent 'clowns'. Each is centred in the page surrounded by a generous white border. Rochelle Steiner introduces the catalogue with an essay about those that have influenced Sherman, and those she has in turn influenced. This survey exhibition, the first of Sherman’s work in the UK for almost 10 years, brought together over 50 works spanning the artist’s career and included new work shown for the first time. Since the mid-1970s, Sherman has taken photographs of herself, combining the roles of director, photographer and leading actress to create provocative and intriguing images in both black-and-white and colour. Never interested in making self-portraits, she adopts a variety of personas and disguises that explore and expose well-defined images and stereotypes of women in Western society across the ages. The Serpentine exhibition centred on the many ‘characters’ and ‘portraits’ Sherman created over the past three decades. In her newest work, Sherman said that she uses clowns “as a trigger for showing the multi-layered emotional depths within a painted smile”.