Untitled (from: For Joseph Beuys), 1986

Cindy Sherman created this edition for the group portfolio honoring Joseph Beuys; the work reflects both her distinctive photographic language and a spirit of metamorphosis often associated with Beuys’ legacy. In the image, a masked or made-up figure peers through a dense thicket of reeds, part concealed, and part revealed – evoking themes of camouflage, transformation, and the tension between nature and artifice. With its eerie palette and ambiguous setting, the work captures the primal undercurrents that animate much of Sherman’s practice, while subtly nodding to Beuys’ own mythic self-invention and exploration of the natural world as a site of meaning.