Untitled #317 [Masks]

Cindy Sherman

  • Year 1995
  • Edition Edition 3/6 + 1 a.p.
  • Material/Technique C-Print
  • Dimensions 144 x 97 cm
  • Category Photography
  • Collection Sammlung Goetz, München

Sherman staged Sex Pictures (1992) exclusively with dolls, thus disappearing fully from her images. They explicitly show the body naked and with pornographic shamelessness. To counteract the viewer’s voyeurism as well as any fetishization of the naked body, Sherman used dolls and body parts from an instructional medical context, which gives them a sterility that is absolutely void of any eroticism and that provides a strong contrast to explicit nudity. 
As implied in the title, the bodies in the Horror and Surrealist Pictures (1994–1996) are very cruelly fragmented and distorted. Sherman no longer shows the body as a unit, but as fragments; as a grotesque collage of artificial body parts. 
In Masks (1994–1996) as well, the inanimate substitute is at the center of attention. The various forms of masks that Sherman developed for this series alternate between the masked identity and an identity of the masks.

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