The Dallas Museum of Art presents the exhibition Cindy Sherman, a retrospective survey on view March 17–June 9, 2013, tracing the groundbreaking artist’s career from the mid-1970s to the present. The touring exhibition, organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, brings together some 160 key photographs from a variety of the artist’s acclaimed bodies of work, for which she created myriad constructed characters and tableaus. The first comprehensive museum survey of Sherman’s career in the United States since 1997, the exhibition draws widely from public and private collections, including the DMA.
Sherman is widely recognized as one of the most important contemporary artists of the last forty years, and is arguably the most influential artist working exclusively with photography. Today her work is the unchallenged cornerstone of postmodern photography. Throughout her career, Sherman has presented a sustained, eloquent, and provocative exploration of the construction of contemporary identity and the nature of representation, drawn from the unlimited supply of images from movies, TV, magazines, the Internet, and art history.
Working as her own model for more than thirty years, she has generated a range of guises and personas that are by turns amusing and disturbing, distasteful and affecting. To create her photographs, she works unassisted in her studio and assumes multiple roles as photographer, model, art director, make-up artist, hairdresser, stylist, and wardrobe mistress. Through her vision and skillful masquerades, Sherman has created an astonishing and continually intriguing variety of characters that resonate deeply within our visual culture.
The exhibition showcases Sherman’s greatest achievements to date through the extraordinary range and evolution of her work, from her early experiments as a student in Buffalo in the 1970s to her recent large-scale photographic murals. The exhibition focuses on some of the dominant themes prevalent throughout Sherman’s work, such as artifice and fiction, cinema and performance, horror and the grotesque, myth and fairy tale, and gender and class identity. A selection of ambitious and celebrated works will be highlighted, including works from major series such as fairy tales/mythology (1985), history portraits (1988–90), sex pictures (1992), headshots (2000), clowns (2002–04), fashion (1983–84, 1993–94, 2007–08), and society portraits (2008). In addition, the exhibition includes a site-specific photographic mural produced in 2011–12, on view for the first time in the United States.
The exhibition is organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Additional support is provided by the Gay and Lesbian Fund for Dallas, the Contemporary Art Initiative, and TWO X TWO for AIDS and Art. Air transportation provided by American Airlines. www.dallasmuseumofart.org