Cindy Sherman, globally recognized for her exploration of identity and gender through carefully observed personas staged before the camera, is presenting her first solo exhibition in Spain in more than twenty years. "Cindy Sherman. The Women" brings together a selection of iconic works created between the 1970s and 2010s, demonstrating how Sherman has radically reinvented the role of the camera in artistic practice.
The exhibition prominently features the legendary "Untitled Film Stills" series (1977-1980), which established the artist as one of the major figures of the Pictures Generation—a group of artists whose work questioned the era of mass media and celebrity culture. This foundational series is presented in dialogue with large-format portraits from later series, in which Sherman embodies movie stars, starlets, high society women, and fashionistas, examining the multiple facets of self-presentation and public perceptions of femininity.
One of the main exhibition halls will showcase the "Bus Riders" and "Murder Mystery" series, along with other works that predate the "Film Stills," which remained unpublished until 2000. These collections demonstrate Sherman's meticulous observations of American society and already sketch the themes and processes she would develop throughout her career. The exhibition offers a rare opportunity to revisit the artist's persistent concerns: the interaction between feminine roles and images, the plurality of feminine identities, and the gaze to which women remain constantly subjected.
"Cindy Sherman. The Women" borrows its title from the successful 1936 play written by Clare Boothe Luce, which featured an exclusively female cast. This ruthless ensemble piece about women examined relationships and interactions between women of different social classes and appearances. Adapted twice for film (1939 and 2008), it is emblematic of classic Hollywood "women's films," a genre around which early feminist film theories were articulated. The play's characters, like Boothe Luce herself, embody the multiple figures of femininity explored by Sherman.
While twentieth-century celebrity culture has evolved into the context of twenty-first-century influencers and social media stars, the artist's deconstructions of gender, wealth, and privilege retain striking relevance. Her work highlights how we construct and perform our identities; each of Sherman's incarnations corresponds to a unique and singular character. She has established herself as the central figure of a subgenre combining performance and photography, expressing the complex, constructed, and performed nature of identity.
The multiplicity of media is central to this representation of complexity: cinema, fashion, magazines, and classical portrait photography, reflexively diverted, contribute both to the work's aesthetics and its message. In the 2010 "Ominous Landscape" series, sophisticatedly dressed female figures pose against vast inhospitable landscapes. Their silhouettes appear strangely displaced, digitally superimposed on island panoramas photographed in Capri, Stromboli, Iceland, and Shelter Island, New York. They will be exhibited here on an island within an island: Illa del Rei in Menorca.
Originally created for an editorial project for Pop magazine, these photographs feature clothing and accessories selected by Sherman from Chanel's archives. The outfits range from 1920s haute couture designed by Coco Chanel herself to contemporary creations by Karl Lagerfeld. These sumptuous costumes contrast with the bleak intensity of the landscapes, while the female characters dominate through their imposing size the nature surrounding them, thus reversing the traditional hierarchy of romantic aesthetics.
This project gave rise to the "Flappers" series, created from 2016 to 2018, inspired by those young women of the 1920s who defied social and sartorial norms as a strategy of empowerment, emancipation, and radical modernity. Some imitated Hollywood stars, posing in glamorous outfits and sporting pronounced and sophisticated makeup. The series also addresses the question of aging: the protagonists are represented several decades after their heyday, apparently unaware of having passed it. Nevertheless, Sherman's incarnations appear more nuanced and sympathetic than the pathetic image of Norma Desmond, the archetype of the delusional narcissistic actress, forgotten after the decline of silent cinema, in "Sunset Boulevard."
Sherman had already worked on series devoted to women from elevated social spheres and aging, some works of which are presented in the exhibition. Among them is one particularly grandiose "Society Portraits" from 2008, a series for which the artist introduced richly ornate frames and the use of screens to compose whimsical environments inhabited by high society women. These backgrounds accentuate the characters' isolation and draw attention to their excessive makeup, absorbed in their wealth and status.
In 2016, for a Harper's Bazaar commission, Sherman embodied socialites and fashionistas in a series of images where the protagonists, dressed in haute couture outfits and accessories, evolve in varied settings. She experimented with multiple exposure to duplicate the represented women, thus symbolizing the fragility and instability of identity.
A selection of the iconic "Untitled Film Stills" occupies the heart of the exhibition, a series of black and white photographs originally conceived as a set of imaginary film stills tracing the career of a single actress. Inspired by 1950s and 1960s Hollywood, film noir, B-movies, and European art cinema, the myriad of characters and scenarios invented by Sherman pastiche the style of production photos used by studios to promote their films. While each image evokes a certain type of character and genre, all remain deliberately ambiguous, leaving us the possibility to imagine our own narratives—or even to project ourselves into the work.
Before the "Film Stills," the exhibition presents works from the "Bus Riders" and "Murder Mystery" series, both created in 1976, as well as a selection of images from the "Line Up" series, taken in 1977, while Sherman was still a student at Buffalo State College in New York State. The "Bus Riders" lay the foundations of her conceptual thinking: by adopting postures, clothing, and facial expressions, Sherman embodies a gallery of cultural stereotypes and ordinary figures of American society, bringing recognizable characters to life.
Conversely, "Murder Mystery" and "Line Up" display a strong theatrical dimension and assumed staging, even deliberately melodramatic expressivity. In some images, the act of photographing is made visible: shutter release cables and floor markings appear in the frame, revealing the apparatus and integrating the creative process into the work. From these early series, Sherman experimented with embodying multiple personas, merging the roles of photographer, model, and narrator.
Throughout her career, Sherman's unwavering attention to the diversity of representations of femininity exposes the play of differences rather than similarities within gender categories. She thus complicates the idea of femininity toward plurality, far from any fixed and unique essence. Born in 1954 in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, Cindy Sherman lives in New York. For more than forty years, her innovative work has questioned themes of representation and identity in contemporary media.
Noticed in the late 1970s within the Pictures Generation—alongside artists like Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, and Louise Lawler—Sherman quickly turned to photography during her art studies at Buffalo State College in the early 1970s. Using prosthetics, theatrical artifices, photographic processes, and digital technologies, she summons and recomposes familiar figures from the collective imagination. Often disturbing, her characters allow her to examine the most grotesque aspects of humanity through the codes of horror and the abject.
"Cindy Sherman. The Women" runs until October 26, 2025, at Hauser & Wirth Menorca, located at Diseminado Illa del Rei, S/N, 07700, Balearic Islands, Spain.
