Above image: Cindy Sherman, ‘Untitled #92’, 1981 © Cindy Sherman

A huge retrospective charting the glittering career of photographer Cindy Sherman is coming to London’s National Portrait Gallery next year.

The show will exhibit 180 of Sherman’s works, including images never publicly exhibited from her groundbreaking work Untitled Stills, the three-year project that began in 1979 famously interrogated the cliched and degrading representation of women in cinema across seventy black and white images shot in New York. The series proved seminal in its depiction of the interplay between reality and artifice and continue to inspire photographers today, including Alex Prager, whose London retrospective this year heavily referenced the thinking of Sherman.

Also on show are five works taken from the Cover Girl series, which pre-dated Untitled Stills and were made when Sherman was still studying, while more recent works like Clowns and Society Portraits will also be included. The exhibition’s curator Paul Moorhouse referred to Sherman’s approach as “completely distinctive” saying, “No other artist interrogates the illusions presented by modern culture in such a penetrating way – or scrutinises so tellingly the façades that people adopt. Probing the elusive connection between appearance and meaning, her work explores contemporary life – and with sharp observation exposes its deceptions.”

Cindy Sherman’s first UK retrospective goes on show at the National Portrait Gallery, London from 27 June – 15 September, 2019.