VIENNA.- Cindy Sherman began studying painting in 1972, at the age of eighteen, at the State University of New York, Buffalo. In 1975, she changed her major from painting to photography. She graduated in 1976 and left Buffalo the following year to move to New York City. Contrary to previous assumption, the famous Untitled Film Stills (1977-1980) were not Sherman’s first works. In fact, during the time from 1975 to 1977 in Buffalo, she produced an extensive body of early work that would become the foundation for her future oeuvre.  Sherman developed her understanding of the contemporary art movements of the era at Hallwalls, an exhibition center run by the artists themselves, which was founded in November 1974 by Sherman’s then boyfriend Robert Longo and Charles Clough. Through the busy visiting artist program at Hallwalls, she got to know Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman, and Chris Burden. However, for Sherman, several women artists were, in her words, “role models,”— including Lynda Benglis, Hannah Wilke, Adrian Piper, Eleanor Antin, and Suzy Lake—because these artists brought their own female bodies into art. Sherman’s early work was crucially inflected by artistic forms emerging in the late 1960s and early 1970s, such as film, video, photography, installation, performance, Conceptual Art, and Body Art.