Cindy Sherman’s exhibition at Hauser & Wirth New York

The exhibition features approximately 30 new works in which the artist has collaged various elements of her own face to construct entirely new characters, using digital manipulation to emphasize layered details and underscore the malleability of the self. She combines a digital collaging technique that incorporates both black and white and color photographs with more traditional methods of transformation, like make-up, wigs and costumery, to create a group of unsettling portraits of women who laugh, wince, smirk and grimace at the viewer. In the double role of both photographer and model, Sherman continues to upend the typical dynamic between artist and subject. Her fabricated women disrupt the voyeur-gaze and subject-object binaries associated with longstanding traditions of portraiture. Like Sherman’s use of prosthetics, the digital manipulation central to this new series exaggerates the tension between identity and artifice. The layering technique creates a site of multiplicity, drawing our attention to the fact that identity is a complex and often constructed human concept that is impossible to capture in a single picture

On view from January 18th to March 16th at Hauser & Wirth New York.