The facial features in Cindy Sherman’s hyperenergetic new photo-portraits slide around crazily. Eyes spin out in different directions, competing clamorously for attention. Noses and mouths engage in pitched conflict. The electrifying images, now on view at Hauser and Wirth’s SoHo gallery, are primarily black and white, but there are patches of vivid color.

Butting one fragment of skin, makeup, hair and headgear up against another, Sherman dispenses with the capacity of Photoshop to smooth out edges. Instead, she creates a sense of instability by folding photographic nips and tucks right in with their aging subjects’ wrinkles. Finding physical comedy in the efforts women take to conceal the effects of time is the least of her concerns. There is also the dark humor she brings to the consideration of photography’s credibility. And the dash of pathos she adds to both.

When Sherman emerged, meteorically, in the late 1970s, it was with an extended series of black and white photographs she took of herself. They are not to be confused with self-portraits. In each, Sherman, newly arrived in New York City from Buffalo, was made up and dressed to suggest she was the (fictional) star of an (imaginary) noirish film. Her timing was perfect. The body-baring, soul-searching feminist art of the late ’60s and early ’70s had given way to more conceptually based work.