Cindy Sherman

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new photographic work by Cindy Sherman. This will also be her first exhibition in Los Angeles since her major traveling retrospective opened at MoCA in 1997.

In this newest body of color images, Sherman has created individual portraits of herself in the guise of women living on the fringes of show business, or aspiring to Hollywood celebrity. Her cast of characters suggests an array of star-struck hopefuls: actresses hoping to find jobs, a child actress now an adult, and ordinary women fantasizing about being "discovered." The strain of it all is evidenced in the collision of "too much" and "not enough"—bad make-up, sun scorched skin and hair, unhappy cosmetic surgery, failed fashions, and an omnipresent aura of high chutzpah and chronic fatigue.

The format of each portrait is a conventional photo-studio pose against plain backdrop paper, with the subjects looking directly at the camera. The command and accomplishment of these photographs are their highly complex mood—comically ridiculing and completely empathetic.

In contemporary photography, these are among the great images of human dreaming and impossibility. The premiere of these pictures in Los Angeles, just days prior to the annual Oscar awards is, therefore, especially appropriate.