The Vancouver Art Gallery, in collaboration with the National Portrait Gallery, London presents Cindy Sherman until March 8th, 2020. Developing a lexicon for an oeuvre spanning more than four decades is an ambitious task for a body of 170+ works that in many ways rejects a fixed identification. This retrospective proves stimulating for a public with varying degrees of acquaintance with Sherman’s work, allowing for a more readily-categorizable account of the deeply extensive body of portraits which in their majority are untitled, and solely classified by a numbering system. Accompanied by text, the exhibition covers some of Sherman’s most distinctive photographic series and commissioned works, as well as biographical details surrounding anchoring points in her artistic career. 

From the 8x10 untitled film stills to the imposingly large society portraits, through to the fully enveloping murals, the public can move from room to room following the evolution of Sherman’s work. Pinpointed by Sherman’s various manipulations of portraiture and its mechanisms as tools for deception, this shift is made apparent from the change from black and white to color photography; to the scale of the portraits that seems to increase chronologically; to an undeniable heightened sense of artifice throughout the years. 

In the midst of finding oneself surrounded by artifice (if still overcome by the urge to seek something “authentic”), one could be interested in the more behind-the-scenes artifacts the exhibition has to offer, such as the photographs displaying Sherman’s studio in New York. The elusiveness of Sherman’s persona, and the mythology of her work, makes this kind of access feel unprecedented, especially as we are presented with various early works created while Sherman was still an art student at the State University College at Buffalo in the 70s. 

The exhibition will be on until March, granting privileged access that allows the public to freely move from rarely-seen works to Sherman’s most seminal works. These engineered transitions allow us to pick apart the stylistic transformations and reoccurrences from the artist’s past, present, and future, and lay bare Sherman’s sense of fantasy and imagination in relation to the sources of inspiration that she continually draws from, such as horror films and high fashion. The characters that Sherman carves out with tools of deception remain nameless, alluding to evocative referents that plague our imaginary of historical and contemporary culture. Always exaggerated and altogether ambiguous, the characters contained within these portraits nonetheless offer a comprehensive look at a fruitful and formative 40+ years of trajectory that continues to provoke and reveal to this day.