In a current interview, Cindy Sherman disclosed she was studying the work of Ottessa Moshfegh. Within the creator’s novel My 12 months of Relaxation and Rest, one character says: “Quickly we’ll be previous and ugly. Life is brief, you recognize? Die younger and depart a lovely corpse.” Sherman’s depiction of womanhood, which frequently veers into the grotesque, contends with this mindset. Her output—produced alone, if aided by prosthetics and digital applied sciences—has an unsettling bent that more and more tackles the impact of age on the feminine physique, which even glamorous movie stars and well-dressed society girls can’t escape. The worth of the gorgeous corpse versus a life spent ‘previous and ugly’ looms over Sherman’s characters, to say nothing of actual girls in our patriarchal society.
The longstanding fascination across the artist’s exploration of gender efficiency and socially constructed personae hasn’t waned. Final 12 months alone, Sherman had solo exhibitions in Belgium at FOMU Fotomuseum Antwerp, in Greece on the Museum of Cycladic Artwork, in Switzerland at Photograph Elysée and in Korea at Espace Louis Vuitton Seoul. Her newest, at Hauser & Wirth’s Menorca location, options work spanning the Seventies to 2010s from eight sequence. The title “Cindy Sherman. The Ladies” nods to a 1936 play with an all-female forged written by Clare Boothe Luce; it was a serious hit on Broadway on the time and twice-over made into a movie. Boothe Luce embodied feminine success as a author, society hostess and patron of the humanities. “She was somebody with a number of identities, so very a lot [akin to] Cindy Sherman and her material,” Tanya Barson, curatorial senior director at Hauser & Wirth and curator of the present, says on the press preview.
Sherman’s riffing on womanhood is proven right here in reverse chronology: the present begins with work from the final decade after which goes backward in time to the artist’s earliest pictures. Based on Barson, “it’s not a complete present by any means, but it surely does embody her profession.”
The opening room options two large-format sequence, each commissions for print publications. Ominous Landscapes (2010-12) was for the British journal Pop, for which Sherman delved into the Chanel archive and donned classic items. (Sherman hasn’t truly named any of her work since Untitled Movie Stills, 1977-1980; others have described her sequence by their content material, and these unofficial titles have a tendency to stay.) The couture on view—together with a cape from 1925 designed by Coco Chanel herself and two white Karl Lagerfeld outfits from 1985 and 2007 positioned in the identical body by way of a number of exposures—are backgrounded by uncooked landscapes snapped in Iceland, Capri, Stromboli and Shelter Island. Hauser & Wirth’s personal island location off Port Mahon, on Illa del Rei, couldn’t be extra becoming. The second sequence within the room showcases two pictures from a 2016 sequence made for Harper’s Bazaar—most eye-catching is a determine in an ornate coat and matching bag by Marc Jacobs, holding an early era iPhone in an incongruous forest setting. Sherman’s dedication to inhabiting totally different variations of femininity by way of her postures and gestures, “tells us the story behind these characters,” Barson says. “She’s an unimaginable actress and storyteller.”
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The second room hosts a sequence generally known as The Flappers (2016-2018), impressed by publicity stills from the Twenties and Nineteen Thirties; it toys with the contemporary emancipation of the fashionable lady, red-lipsticked and smoking. Though nominally placeless, the backgrounds allude to skyscrapers in New York or the cabaret tradition of the Neue Sachlichkeit in Berlin. The growing older starlets depicted resist acknowledging that they’re, in showbiz phrases, previous their prime. Is Sherman judging these girls for contorting themselves to suit a youth-obsessed mildew? Barson takes a softer view: “I believe you’ll be able to’t assume a personality to this diploma of proximity and accuracy with out being additionally sympathetic.” In an Art21 documentary video on view on the finish of the exhibition, Sherman denies ever meaning to be important of her topics, even with unpleasant appearances.
Subsequent follows Sherman’s most well-known sequence, Untitled Movie Stills (1977-1980), plucking from the enduring portfolio of seventy black-and-white images meant to embody a single actress’s profession. Sherman drew from post-war cinema: Fifties Hollywood, French Nouvelle Imprecise, Italian New Realist cinema. Earlier than the arrival of digital know-how, Sherman was staging her figures immediately inside their atmosphere (“it’s akin to filming on location,” says Barson). One wall blows up a movie nonetheless as wallpaper onto which the images are hung: “just a little bit tautological.”
This late Seventies interval was the period of the Footage Era, an inventive cohort addressing the trimmings of mass media (amongst them Laurie Simmons, Richard Prince and Barbara Kruger). This was the last decade when “the ladies’s motion claimed the feminine physique as a website for political wrestle, mobilizing round abortion rights above all, however with different ancillary points spiraling out into agitation over medical marginalization and sexuality itself as a supply of ladies’s oppression,” theorist Laura Mulvey wrote in 1991, famously contextualizing Sherman’s work in artwork principle phrases. “A politics of the physique led logically to a politics of illustration of the physique”—finally resulting in what she deemed “political aesthetics.”
With reference to political aesthetics, Barson notes John Berger’s Methods of Seeing, revealed in 1972, scrutinized how males have a look at girls and the way girls, in flip, grapple with being checked out. This sort of hyperawareness is on the core of Sherman’s self-fashioned work. Barson asserts Sherman was “many years forward of our present second of social media and the development of id for the digital camera.”
Within the following room are three totally different sequence from Sherman’s very early output, produced whereas she was nonetheless a school scholar. Bus Riders (1976) showcases a reputable typology of public transportation characters, gripping college books or clasping a grocery retailer paper bag, whereas The Homicide Thriller is extra explicitly theatrical. Neither sequence was proven till 2000. The final sequence within the room, The Lineup (1977), options girls in make-up harking back to “early Expressionist cinema.” The artifice of image-making isn’t camouflaged: electrical cables are seen in these black-and-white portraits.
The ultimate room hosts a complicated growing older grande dame in a gold body—the one non-photographic body within the present—paired with two extra pictures from the Flappers sequence. On this Society Portrait from the 2008 sequence, made in entrance of a inexperienced display screen, the lady’s overzealous software of blush solely underscores her overcorrecting for her superior age.
All through the present, Barson celebrates Sherman’s potential to amalgamate collective imagery and channel that into one thing new, regardless of it feeling pre-existing. Barson places it thusly: “I believe that is her expertise: this uncanny knack for synthesizing every little thing that we’ve seen… and placing it right into a single picture.”
“Cindy Sherman. The Ladies” is at Hauser & Wirth in Menorca by way of October 26, 2025.
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