PARIS, FRANCE.- The Jeu de Paume presents Cindy Sherman, Retrospective, on view through September 3, 2006. Ever since her first works some thirty years ago, Cindy Sherman has herself been pretty much the sole model for her elaborately staged images. In each series, she has used costumes, make-up, props and even prostheses to turn herself into the personas that she photographs in the studio. The result is a major body of work, and one of the first in the field of contemporary visual art, along with Jeff Wall's, to be wholly photographic.

Funny, grating, sometimes brutal, the figures in this gallery of figures explore cultural and social stereotypes and their representation in the media, from magazine centrefolds to advertisements, films and classical painting. What emerges through these images is a subtle analysis of individual identity, both the fantasies that it generates and the forces that shape it. This immersion in the uncertain, conflictual zones where individual identity struggles with the collective imaginary, stereotypes and issues of symbolic power, can be either playful or — when it touches on horror and repulsion, on the decay and dismembering of the body — very dark.

This retrospective, featuring work from 1975 to 2005, shows the development and richly inventive quality of Sherman's art and gives a sense of its structuring themes and the very pertinent questions that it raises. The exhibition was curated by Régis Durand and Véronique Dabin.