The solitary aspects of Coronavirus confinements that connected people solely via a camera on Zoom and the likes was probably second nature for artist Cindy Sherman. The fine art photographer has been creating and projecting herself as the subject of her work since 1975 through the many characters she portrays in her art.

Now she is the subject of Cindy Sherman at the Fondation Louis Vuitton exhibition in Paris.

With Americans unable to be in the French capital because of travel restrictions, we wanted to bring a taste of the city’s cultural happenings to you.

It’s the first time since 2006 that the American artist has shown in Paris – and thus far, it’s the most comprehensive view with over 170 works displayed. The show was created in close collaboration with Sherman and curator Suzanne Pagé, the museum’s artistic director.

Sherman’s work vis-à-vis the characters she creates mirrors the often false reality social media projects. Through these works, she is the OG of selfies despite a personal disdain for them. She explored the idea to the fullest, recreating fashion influencers in a 2016 Harper’s Bazaar spread wearing Prada, Chanel, and Gucci among others. She ultimately embraced social media and used Instagram filters on a series of seven tapestries on display for the first time in the exhibit, which combine the ancient tapestry craft with today’s technology.

Sherman’s love of dressing up was the impetus for her craft and mirrors fashion photography’s artifice. Her work defines the work of the fashion stylist who, along with the photographer, sets the mood and tells a story via clothes, hair, makeup, the setting, and props. In Sherman’s case, she wears all of these hats. In a nod to her extensive makeup use, gallery walls are painted in intense hues of turquoise, hot pink, orange and yellow. Sherman has tackled subjects that range from Hollywood to socialites to Renaissance figures to flappers, clowns, and a unique series that portrayed mutilated Barbie dolls as a statement of the morbidity of sex during the AIDS crisis.  Naturally, some of her most profound works centered around fashion. In 1983, the legendary downtown store Dianne B. owner Dianne Benson, a friend of Sherman’s, lent her clothing by Jean-Paul Gaultier and French label Dorothée Bis, with which to create new work. A decade later, she would collaborate on works with Comme des Garçons in a series of postcards. A project with British Vogue resulted in her Clowns series wearing pieces from John Galliano’s Spring 2003 Ready-to-Wear and the artists’ first dip into using Photoshop to enhance her work. In 2007, she collaborated with Balenciaga on a series on display as well. Her Landscapes series, in collaboration with Chanel, shows her wearing designs of both Coco Chanel and Karl Lagerfeld.

Her work also explored gender fluidity long before it was ‘trending’ so to speak. From a one-woman play photo series in 1975, the artist plays all the characters, both male and female, and cuts the photograph out to assemble as scenes of a bourgeois soap opera play. She portrays men of  the Renaissance in the History Portraits. In the rarely viewed Men series from 2019, where she collaborated with Stella McCartney . Using the designer’s’ menswear collection, she plays several men and even a male and female couple in one image.

The retrospective runs side by side with Crossing View, which features the foundation’s permanent collection perused by and selected through Sherman’s lens in a similar vein of portraiture. On the second and third levels of the Fondation, the show continues with artwork by Marina Abramović, Louise Bourgeois, Damien Hirst, Rob Pruitt, Wolfgang Tillmans, Rineke Dijkstra, Andy Warhol, and Christian Boltanski’s dizzying video triptych comprised of TV news and media images recorded each year on the artist’s birthday. Also, on display are pictures from a Casa Susanna photo album that Sherman acquired. The photos depict the heterosexual transvestite men and transgender women who escaped to the secret upstate New York hideaway to express themselves freely when that was illegal in most places.

The exhibition runs through January 3, 2021.