An analysis of how the market responds to collecting towards this artist, beloved and favored by collectors for having distinguished herself in appropriating the stereotypes presented by a flurry of mass media – from advertising, television and magazines to cinema – her works explore identity, gender and art as visual and representational constructs. In any case, this is an artist who deserves attention and who could return to improve market performance depending on how the contemporary art market will settle in the near future.
Cindy Sherman was born in Glen Ridge, New Jersey in 1954, and became one of the most important artists of the Pictures Generation, a group that also included Richard Prince, Sherrie Levine, Louise Lawler, and Robert Longo, in the 70s. Over the course of her five-decade career, Sherman produced iconic photographic self-portraits that examine the nature of contemporary image-making.
Sherman is a conceptual chameleon, adept at adapting to the many roles her works require.
Ceasing to be simple portraits of the artist, Sherman’s photographs accentuate and question the very ways in which women have been represented in cinema, media and art history. Often bold and seductive images with a critical eye towards the nature of printed paper and magazine advertisements, images that combine with the cinematic setting to enhance psychological tension and human emotion.
Sherman attended the State University College at Buffalo and moved to Manhattan at the age of 23 in 1977. There she quickly gained widespread recognition for her seminal series of Untitled Film Stills, a suite of 69 black-and-white photographs taken between 1977 and 1980 in which she invented and played various female characters. Dressed in costumes, wigs, makeup, and props, she explored cinematic tropes of 50s and 60s Hollywood, film noir, and European art films: the American housewife, the career girl, the femme fatale, the heroine, and the damsel in distress. Serving as both a model and a photographer for her images, Sherman hijacks the traditions of female subjectivity that underpin art history. Such strategies connected her to influential postmodernist theorists such as Laura Mulvey, the feminist film critic who coined the term “male gaze” in 1975 to describe the way women, at the mercy of the camera lens, are transformed into objects of desire. In the 80s, Sherman moved to color photography and larger formats. Turning away from glamour and celebrity toward the visceral and grotesque, she has since produced acclaimed series such as The Centrefolds (1981)—Untitled #96 sold for $3.890.500 at Christie’s New York in 2011—Disasters (1986–89), History Portraits (1989–90), Sex Pictures (1992), and Clowns (2003).
Art Price Indicator on the performance of works on the market
Some awards compared according to the type of work, film or photograph
- Video Untitled (#40)
Realized price
$218.500 in November 2011 from Christies
Estimate: USD 250.000 – USD 350.000
signed, numbered and dated ‘Cindy Sherman 1979 2/3’ (on the reverse)
gelatin silver print
30 x 40 inches (76,2 x 101,6 cm.)
Executed in 1979. This work is the second of an edition of three.
In case of photography: Photography, Gelatin silver print, Edition 10/10. 20,3 x 25,4 cm. Hammer price: €59.801 ($65.000). Price including buyer’s premium: €75.349 ($81.900).Estimate: €55.201 – €73.601 ($60.000 – $80.000).17 May 2024. Christie’s – New York
The behavior of a work (Atiled (Lucille Ball) awarded at auction on January 14, 2025, then in June 2023 and finally in 2012
I)
- Untitled (Lucille Ball) (1975)
- Photography
- Chromogenic printing
- 26,7×21,3 cm
- Hammer price: €7.777 ($8.000)
- Price including buyer’s premium: €9.955 ($10.240)
- Estimate: €7.777 – €11.666 ($8.000 – $12.000)
- From 06 January 2025 to 14 January 2025
- Online only
- Bonhams Skinner Marlborough United States
II)
- Untitled (Lucille Ball) (1975)
- Chromogenic print. 2001 edition
- 26 x 21cm
- Hammer price: €10.000
- Price including purchase commission: €12.600
- Estimate: €7.000 – €9.000
- From May 23, 2023 to June 06, 2023
- Online only
- Christie’s – France
I
- Untitled (Lucille Ball) (1975)
- Chromogenic print. Printed in 2001
- 26,1 x 20,8cm
- Hammer price: €6.500
- Estimate: €4.000 – €5.000
- 23th November 2012
- Westlicht Photographic Auction
- Vienna, Austria
Only in 2018 we find the same one with a higher hammer price from Swann Auction (reported below)
I
Realized Price: $25.000
Estimate: $7.000 – $10.000
Self-Portrait as Lucille Ball. Chromogenic print, image measures 10 1/2×8 1/4 inches (26,7×21 cm.), sheet 12×9 1/2 inches (30,5×24,1 cm.), with Sherman’s signature and dates, in ink, on verso. 1975; printed 2001
If we want to see something more recent we find Untitled #555 (2010/12) on auction at Cambi Milano last January 21, 2025
- Photography
- Print C/aluminium
- Edition 5/10
- 86×59 cm
- Award not yet communicated
- Estimate: €30.000 – €35.000
- Signed and dated
- Provenance: Metro Pictures, New York Purchased there by the current owners
- Illustrated on page 31 of the catalogue
Sherman’s women are not women but images of women, mirror models of femininity projected by the media to encourage imitation, identification; they are, in other words, tropes, figures.” (C. Owens, quoted in E. Respini, “Will the Real Cindy Sherman Please Stand Up?”, Cindy Sherman, exhibition cat, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2012, p. 24)
And now we just have to wait and see “From Cindy Sherman to Francesco Vezzoli. 80 Contemporary Artists” edited by Daniele Fenaroli, with the scientific support of Vincenzo De Bellis. An exhibition Municipality of Milan – Culture | Palazzo Reale | Arthemisia in collaboration with the Giuseppe Iannaccone Foundation
