In Menorca, Cindy Sherman’s Cinematic Take on Womanhood
In a recent interview, Cindy Sherman disclosed she was reading the work of Ottessa Moshfegh. In the author’s novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation, one character says: “Soon we’ll be old and ugly. Life is short, you know? Die young and leave a beautiful corpse.” Sherman’s depiction of womanhood, which often veers into the grotesque, contends with this mindset. Her output—produced alone, if aided by prosthetics and digital technologies—has an unsettling bent that increasingly tackles the effect of age on the female body, which even glamorous film stars and well-dressed society women can’t escape. The value of the beautiful corpse versus a life spent ‘old and ugly’ looms over Sherman’s characters, to say nothing of real women in our patriarchal society.
The longstanding fascination around the artist’s exploration of gender performance and socially constructed personae hasn’t waned. Last year alone, Sherman had solo exhibitions in Belgium at FOMU Fotomuseum Antwerp, in Greece at the Museum of Cycladic Art, in Switzerland at Photo Elysée and in Korea at Espace Louis Vuitton Seoul. Her latest, at Hauser & Wirth’s Menorca location, features work spanning the 1970s to 2010s from eight series. The title “Cindy Sherman. The Women” nods to a 1936 play with an all-female cast written by Clare Boothe Luce; it was a major hit on Broadway at the time and twice-over made into a film. Boothe Luce embodied female success as a writer, society hostess and patron of the arts. “She was someone with multiple identities, so very much [akin to] Cindy Sherman and her subject matter,” Tanya Barson, curatorial senior director at Hauser & Wirth and curator of the show, says at the press preview.
Sherman’s riffing on womanhood is shown here in reverse chronology: the show starts with work from the last decade and then goes backward in time to the artist’s earliest images. According to Barson, “it’s not a comprehensive show by any means, but it does encompass her career.”
The opening room features two large-format series, both commissions for print publications. Ominous Landscapes (2010-12) was for the British magazine Pop, for which Sherman delved into the Chanel archive and donned vintage pieces. (Sherman hasn’t actually named any of her work since Untitled Film Stills, 1977-1980; others have described her series by their content, and these unofficial titles tend to stick.) The couture on view—including a cape from 1925 designed by Coco Chanel herself and two white Karl Lagerfeld outfits from 1985 and 2007 placed in the same frame through multiple exposures—are backgrounded by raw landscapes snapped in Iceland, Capri, Stromboli and Shelter Island. Hauser & Wirth’s own island location off Port Mahon, on Illa del Rei, couldn’t be more fitting. The second series in the room showcases two images from a 2016 series made for Harper’s Bazaar—most eye-catching is a figure in an ornate coat and matching bag by Marc Jacobs, holding an early generation iPhone in an incongruous forest setting. Sherman’s commitment to inhabiting different versions of femininity through her postures and gestures, “tells us the story behind these characters,” Barson says. “She’s an incredible actress and storyteller.”
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The second room hosts a series known as The Flappers (2016-2018), inspired by publicity stills from the 1920s and 1930s; it toys with the fresh emancipation of the modern woman, red-lipsticked and smoking. Although nominally placeless, the backgrounds allude to skyscrapers in New York or the cabaret culture of the Neue Sachlichkeit in Berlin. The aging starlets depicted resist acknowledging that they are, in showbiz terms, past their prime. Is Sherman judging these women for contorting themselves to fit a youth-obsessed mold? Barson takes a softer view: “I think you can’t assume a character to this degree of proximity and accuracy without being also sympathetic.” In an Art21 documentary video on view at the end of the exhibition, Sherman denies ever intending to be critical of her subjects, even with unsightly appearances.
Next follows Sherman’s most well-known series, Untitled Film Stills (1977-1980), plucking from the iconic portfolio of seventy black-and-white photos meant to encompass a single actress’s career. Sherman drew from post-war cinema: 1950s Hollywood, French Nouvelle Vague, Italian New Realist cinema. Before the advent of digital technology, Sherman was staging her figures directly within their environment (“it’s akin to filming on location,” says Barson). One wall blows up a film still as wallpaper onto which the photos are hung: “a little bit tautological.”
This late 1970s period was the era of the Pictures Generation, an artistic cohort addressing the trappings of mass media (among them Laurie Simmons, Richard Prince and Barbara Kruger). This was the decade when “the women’s movement claimed the female body as a site for political struggle, mobilizing around abortion rights above all, but with other ancillary issues spiraling out into agitation over medical marginalization and sexuality itself as a source of women’s oppression,” theorist Laura Mulvey wrote in 1991, famously contextualizing Sherman’s work in art theory terms. “A politics of the body led logically to a politics of representation of the body”—ultimately leading to what she deemed “political aesthetics.”
On the subject of political aesthetics, Barson notes John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, published in 1972, scrutinized how men look at women and how women, in turn, grapple with being looked at. This kind of hyperawareness is at the core of Sherman’s self-fashioned work. Barson asserts Sherman was “decades ahead of our current moment of social media and the construction of identity for the camera.”
In the following room are three different series from Sherman’s very early output, produced while she was still a college student. Bus Riders (1976) showcases a credible typology of public transportation characters, gripping school books or clasping a grocery store paper bag, while The Murder Mystery is more explicitly theatrical. Neither series was shown until 2000. The last series in the room, The Lineup (1977), features women in makeup reminiscent of “early Expressionist cinema.” The artifice of image-making isn’t camouflaged: electrical cables are visible in these black-and-white portraits.
The final room hosts a posh aging grande dame in a gold frame—the only non-photographic frame in the show—paired with two additional images from the Flappers series. In this Society Portrait from the 2008 series, made in front of a green screen, the woman’s overzealous application of blush only underscores her overcorrecting for her advanced age.
Throughout the show, Barson celebrates Sherman’s ability to amalgamate collective imagery and channel that into something new, in spite of it feeling pre-existing. Barson puts it thusly: “I think this is her talent: this uncanny knack for synthesizing everything that we’ve seen… and putting it into a single image.”
“Cindy Sherman. The Women” is at Hauser & Wirth in Menorca through October 26, 2025.