Mid-January 2010. Ugly makeup, like mistakes, messy, crazy, taking the face to the extreme. I’ve made some drawings with parts of the face that look good, but I’m not sure where they’ll end up; too psychedelic.”
Thus begins Cindy Sherman’s “diary” in which she recounts the long journey that led her to the solo show that has just ended at Hauser & Wirth, SoHo, in which the artist who won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 1999, addressed one of the most uncomfortable topics that is still taboo in the image society: aging. But let’s take a step back, because by retracing her extraordinary career we can see how aging was a central theme, even when she didn’t belong to her age. Starting from Untitled Film Stills, the well-known series of black and white photographs made between 1977 and 1980 in which she portrayed herself disguised as characters inspired by film noir from the 1950s and 1960s – a collection of her prints has been sold at Christie’s in New York for 6.77 million dollars – Sherman worked on identity and its fragilities, impersonating stereotypes of the collective imagination legitimized by cinema, television, advertising and fashion magazines. However, the work on vulnerability linked to the passing of the years emerged distinctly in 2016 with The Flappers, a series dedicated to Hollywood stars of the 1920s such as Gloria Swanson and Greta Garbo, played by herself, but not shown as they were, rather as they would be become, in other words aged. At the time, Sherman was 62 years old, she hadn’t taken photos for five: with this work, for the first time she dealt explicitly with aging. “I think my work has always been about how women are represented in the media,” she told the Guardian in 2016. “This series comes from the fact that you don’t often see portrayals of older women in fashion and film. My goal was not to add wrinkles to look older but to use wrinkles to communicate”, she continued. “In fact, it doesn’t bother me to always see new ones on my face, but to realize that the range of my possibilities has become more limited: I could certainly turn into a centenarian, but if I try to go back to being a girl it would now seem like a stretch.” Yet there was no resignation in her words, on the contrary. «From my portraits of Gloria Swanson, Greta Garbo and others you can see that they are survivors, who have gone through a lot of life. You can see some pain in their faces, but they look to the future, they are projected forward.”
With this latest exhibition (some of the works are published in these pages), Sherman surpasses herself by overturning every female stereotype. And he does so through photographic works in which he transforms his face by adding wrinkles, drooping eyelids, disproportionate noses that evoke Cubist decomposition and Picasso’s portraits, eyebrow arches that go in different directions, crooked eyes, grimaces, smiles, laughter, too many teeth perfect, exaggerated makeup (the kind found in tutorials on YouTube and TikTok). “I will not face the arrival of old age in silence or with joy,” she admitted to the New York Times when presenting the exhibition at Hauser & Wirth. «I feel like I’m preparing for this… Kind of like saying: this is what you’re going to become, so get used to it. Is coming”. The result is a new image of a woman far from any cliché of representation of decadence and old age. These women are energetic, ironic, interesting, intriguing, to the point of being aware that their identity is not determined by their age but by the present moment, by what they have been, are, and will be. Any examples? Entirely in black and white, except for her red lips, she is the woman of Untitled #654 (right), wearing a gigantic black satin nightcap that frames her face as in Caravaggio’s Medusa and returns an image proud, powerful and disturbing. Or Untitled #632 (on the previous page), in which the protagonist – not to be confused with a self-portrait, Sherman is keen to underline – tightens her mouth in a menacing grimace, glued in post-production with Photoshop, as if it were a cubist collage. The teeth painted white stand out on the carmine red lips with a shiny and smeared clown lipstick, while the entire mouth and the open blue eye – the other is closed – create a strong contrast with the forehead and half of the face in black and white.
The artist, born in New Jersey in 1954, turned seventy in January and has not lost the caustic irony that has always characterized her women full of that corrosive criticism disguised as bon ton with which, since her beginnings, she appropriated her characters to show how female identity is much freer, unpredictable, enigmatic, complex and profound compared to stereotypes and conventions.
“Aging is difficult for anyone, but especially for women, and in particular when you use your own image in your work,” the artist confided to the Financial Times. «This, for me, has become more evident with the advent of new cameras because now every wrinkle, every little bump, every pore I have is highlighted. The ironic thing is that in the work I shot thirteen years ago I was making all these expressions that were really contorted, trying to capture and accentuate the wrinkles. Today, if I work on a self-portrait, however, I don’t need to distort myself so much. Today this is how I look.”
In this series, the use of color along with black and white emphasizes the postproduction process. If in the Seventies Sherman’s creativity took place mostly in front of the camera with makeup, costumes, vintage clothes, wigs, prosthetics, with which the artist modified and manipulated his appearance, today in his TriBeCa studio he adds to a real transformation of the faces, the post-production work intervening directly on the photography, both for the works intended for museums and for the posts on his Instagram profile. She tells it herself, always in her work notes. “Late March 2023. Interestingly, using apps for my Instagram portraits has made me rethink the way I use photoshop for these images, it’s actually not that different. It helped me to loosen up, to be more reckless, less sophisticated, to take risks.”
Photo Cindy Sherman – Gelatin silver print and chromogenic color print – Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
