Untitled #602 by Cindy Sherman, 2019. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

Cindy Sherman, iconic American photographer and artist, has been putting on a dazzling one-woman show for her entire decades-long career, and her newest body of work is an intriguing, masterful continuation of this performance. Acting as model, photographer, makeup artist, stylist, and hairdresser all at once, Sherman is known for fabricating and adopting a wide variety of personalities, creating work that comprehensively explores the construct of identity and the illusion of self. In her latest work, currently on display at Metro Pictures in New York City until October 31, Sherman has transformed herself this time into a collection of brooding, androgynous characters, each shrouded in mystery yet possessing their own distinct individuality.

A New Jersey native, Sherman got her start as a painter at Buffalo State College in New York, but she quickly turned to photography as a medium for fully realizing her vision. The landmark series that established her distinguishable style, Untitled Film Stills, features Sherman disguised as quintessential female actresses in large-scale black and white photographs. Assuming the features, dispositions, and wardrobes of self-produced fictional figures, she morphs seamlessly from persona to persona, commenting on the superficiality and interchangeability of the archetypal Hollywood movie star.

In her latest collection of larger-than-life photographs, Sherman departs from her ongoing study on female identities to investigate epicene, genderless characters that loom regally throughout the exhibition. Her diverse personas, immaculately clothed in boldly patterned Stella McCartney pieces, all gaze coldly through the lens against dizzying, digitally manipulated backdrops, blurring reality with fiction; she simultaneously forgoes any trace of her own identity while stamping her work with a signature Cindy Sherman flair.

In her image, Untitled #611, an almost unrecognizable Sherman, dressed in green trousers and a button up, slumps in front of a never-ending horizon of picturesque clouds and an indistinguishable suburban sprawl. Her blue eyes peer apprehensively from behind oversized, gold-rimmed glasses, her hair perfectly gelled back. With a Tilda Swinton-esque air of mystery and anonymity, Sherman reels the viewer in with her direct gaze and inviting vulnerability. The image feels concurrently like a high-fashion editorial cover page and a large-scale, European-style portrait painting, meshing stark individuality with incredibly detailed atmospheric elements and a keenly sophisticated sense of style.

Though she rarely inserts aspects of her own identity into these portraits, her powerful underlying presence and unique point of view are strongly felt; as she matures, her work gains an even deeper, more refined command of irony and realization. Underneath the guise of other people lies Sherman’s true chameleonic character—the spirit that has driven her genre-changing style since the beginning of her career.

Unconcerned with portraying a stereotypical image of beauty, Sherman uses charade to expose the latent seduction of the misfit, the imperfect, and the grotesque. She reveals the nature of how we constitute our truest beings through abandoning her outward appearance and exploring her own fluidity of self. Though her method of depiction is ever-evolving, a consistent, insatiable appetite for representing a myriad of facades of human identity remains the cornerstone for Sherman’s work.