Sherman restages old master portrait types with prosthetics, costumes, false noses, artificial breasts, and theatrical lighting. The images are funny, grotesque, and sharp. Art history’s elegance begins to look like performance, power, and costume. The past is not destroyed; it is unmasked.
Color photographs using elaborate makeup, prosthetics, studio lighting, and references to Renaissance, Baroque, and Neoclassical portraiture.
Fake body parts and costumes expose ideals of beauty, class, gender, and authority as constructed images.
Postmodern artists questioned museums, canons, authorship, and the supposedly neutral authority of art history.
“The still must tease with the promise of a story the viewer of it itches to be told.”
The series influenced contemporary artists who remix historical imagery to expose its assumptions.
What did this stir in you?