Untitled #275, 1993.
Serpentine chief curator Rochelle Steiner’s Cindy Sherman overview focuses on staged portraiture, which allows the artist to hide in plain sight as a shape-shifting Everywoman: starlet, frump, Madonna, ogre, aging trophy wife. With some forty photographs from the “Untitled Film Stills” and more recent pieces that continue the artist’s 2000 series skewering anxious, oblivious career girls, the show investigates Sherman’s mix of satire and sympathy. “I want that choked-up feeling in your throat which may come from despair or teary-eyed sentimentality,” she wrote early on, before burying all traces of sentimentality in grotesquerie. Her return to portraiture by proxy gives this show its unsentimental but happy ending.
