In her staged photographs, Cindy Sherman employs a range of tools, including makeup, costumes, prosthetics, and wigs. In her masks series, which she produced alongside her horror and surrealist works, she uses masks as instruments and places them in the foreground.
In Untitled #317, Sherman wears a mysterious-looking, golden half-mask that seamlessly conforms to the contours of her face and the gold-painted skin. Yet something disturbs the peaceful, bronze-like impression. Red-rimmed eyes peek out from under the mask, and Sherman’s mouth is distorted into a mocking smile by black makeup.
Sherman, who directed the horror film Office Killer in 1997, is fascinated by the horror genre and its macabre aesthetic. In numerous classics, such as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre or The Silence of the Lambs, the mask merges with the figure of the “killer,” serving both as an expression of the danger emanating from him and as a symbol of alienation.
While some of her series, such as the horror and mask paintings, explicitly play with menace and violence, an underlying sense of danger pervades Sherman’s entire oeuvre. Along with Sherrie Levine and Richard Prince, she is considered part of the Pictures Generation, whose work critically examines the rise of mass media, exploring the darker aspects of a colorful, commercial visual world.
