Cindy Sherman at Cycladic: Early Works

On display is the entirety of Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills (1977–1980) series. Consisting of 70 black-and-white photographs, Untitled Film Stills began after Sherman moved to New York City in 1977, aged 23. Inspired by 1950s and 1960s Hollywood, film noir, B movies and European art-house films, Sherman created images suggestive of the production stills used by movie studios to publicize their films.

The images, reminiscent of certain character types and genres, initiated conversations about gender roles, feminism and representation, remaining always intentionally ambiguous and open to interpretations.

In 1980, Sherman turned to color photography to create Rear Screen Projections. Incorporating a technique often used by Alfred Hitchcock, she posed in her studio in front of a large screen, onto which images of various sites were projected.

In this way, she gained more control over the final image while extending her dialogue with cinema. The resulting images, in which she continues assuming the role of the model, blur the lines of reality and artifice.

A year later, Artforum commissioned Sherman to create a series for the magazine, which led to Centerfolds (1981). Referencing erotic images found in men’s magazines at the time, this body of work challenged the popular way of consuming images of women, drawing attention to the voyeuristic gaze of the viewer.

Even though the magazine never published these photos for fear of public backlash, these are one of Sherman’s most famous series of works.

In the large-scale vertical works of Color Studies (1981–1982), Sherman photographed herself looking directly at the camera, and by extension, at the viewer. As she continued to play with the constructed nature of images of women, her experimentation with color and shadow is prominent.

These are, again, invented images that bring to the foreground the fragile boundaries between what is real and what is artificial, covering and revealing the subjects of her shots through shadow and light.