Cindy Sherman

Metro Pictures, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Los Angeles, The Museum of Contemporary Art; Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art; Prague, Galerie Rudolfinum; London, Barbican Art Gallery; Musée d’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux; Sydney, Museum of Contemporary Art; Toronto, Art Gallery of Ontario, Cindy Sherman: Retrospective, November 1997 - January 2000, cat. no. 19, p. 134, illustrated in color (another example exhibited)

This work is in excellent condition overall. There is a small indentation in the top right corner of the sheet approximately 5 inches from both the top and right edge. Framed under Plexiglas.
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Untitled #154 exemplifies Cindy Sherman’s uncanny ability to captivate viewers and subvert societal expectations by transforming her own image. This work is an incredible example from Sherman’s ground-breaking 1985 Fairy Tale series, which marked the artist’s departure from her previous, cinematic images to a world of utter make-believe. Before her own lens, Sherman morphs into a character so unrecognizable, so strange, that the viewer is forced to question his or her own definition of fantasy.

The Fairy Tale series marks a moment of dramatic breakthrough in Sherman’s oeuvre, as the artist abandoned any pretense of reality in her photographs and entered a grotesque world of her own imagination. In her earlier series, notably Untitled Film Stills and Centerfolds, Sherman transformed her appearance to replicate familiar female stereotypes in film and pornography, exposing the gender tropes of both genres in the process. In 1985, Sherman was commissioned by the magazine Vanity Fair to create a series of photographs inspired by the fantastic world of children’s fairytales. Subverting all expectations for the commission, Sherman produced a series so unsettling that Vanity Fair—akin to Artforum, when confronted with Sherman’s Centerfolds—declined to publish the disturbing images. Rather than summoning the familiar whimsy of bedtime stories, the photographs recall the macabre, distressing narratives of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson. The uncanny air of the series is compounded by Sherman’s use, for the first time in her career, of deformed prostheses and stage make-up to fully warp her appearance. Reveling in her own mutability and artificiality, Sherman sheds identity after identity before the lens, growing ever more fantastically strange with each mutation.

Untitled #154 is one of the most destabilizing works from the whimsical world of the Fairy Tales. The image seems snatched from some broader narrative, suggesting that there are untold horrors beyond the limits of the lens. Though fairytales are constructed upon the clear difference between good and evil, the viewer is simultaneously repulsed and intrigued by the strange figure, lit by the glowing light of an unseen fire. Although Sherman leans forward to engage the viewer, the bedraggled lace of her dress falling seductively open, any rising desire is checked by the glistening decay of her groping hand and the uncanny, accusing intensity of her stare. The garish color palette, artificial lighting, and larger-than-life size of the image all reinforce the overwhelming fantasy of the photograph; Sherman celebrates her ability to shock the viewer with her own, twisted imagination. In Untitled #154, Sherman offers a glimpse of her own unnamed fears, reminding the viewer that fantasy and fear—or photograph and fiction—are not so disparate after all.