CINDY SHERMAN (B. 1954)

In her series, History Portraits, Sherman created thirty-five works that are her own unique renditions of historical portraits. She poses as the classical sitter in her portraits, using props, cheap costume jewelry, wigs, and fake appendages to assume the characters that serve as the signifiers of an amalgamated but anonymous classical high art figure. In works such as Untitled #194, Sherman masquerades as a man and this gender reversal has been associated with the work of Marcel Duchamp and the famous image of herself in drag as his alter-ego Rrose Sélavy.

"There is something liberating in the way in which Sherman takes aim at the sheer weirdness of Old Master art." (A. Arenas, "Afraid of the Dark: Cindy Sherman and the Grotesque Imagination," exh. cat., Cindy Sherman, Shiga, 1996, p. 46).