Renowned American photographer Cindy Sherman is presenting her first solo exhibition in Spain in more than 20 years with "Cindy Sherman. The Women" at Hauser & Wirth Menorca. The exhibition showcases a comprehensive selection of Sherman's most iconic works spanning from the 1970s to the 2010s, highlighting how the artist revolutionized the role of the camera in contemporary artistic practice through her exploration of identity and gender.
The exhibition features Sherman's groundbreaking "Untitled Film Stills" (1977-1980), the pivotal series that brought her widespread recognition as a key member of the Pictures Generation artists who rose to prominence in the 1970s and 80s. This influential group responded to the emerging age of mass media and celebrity culture, fundamentally changing how art engaged with popular imagery. The Film Stills will be displayed alongside Sherman's large-format portrayals of film stars, starlets, society women, and fashionistas from various series created over subsequent decades, all addressing the complex layers of femininity's presentation and public perception.
One of the central galleries is dedicated to Sherman's "Bus Riders" and "Murder Mystery" series, along with other early works that actually predate the famous Film Stills but weren't publicly displayed until 2000. These pieces illustrate Sherman's detailed observations of American society and reveal the starting point for themes and methods that would develop throughout her entire career. The range of works on display offers a rare presentation of Sherman's enduring concern with the interaction between female roles and images, and the various gazes to which women are constantly subjected.
The exhibition's title references Clare Boothe Luce's 1936 all-female hit play "The Women," a merciless ensemble piece exploring women's interactions across different social classes and appearances. The play, which was adapted into feature films in both 1939 and 2008, exemplifies the genre of classical Hollywood women's films that became central to feminist film theory. Both the characters in Luce's play and Luce herself represent the multifarious kinds of femininity that Sherman explores in her photographic work.
Among the featured works are images from Sherman's 2010 "Ominous Landscapes" series, where elaborately dressed female figures stand against vast and inhospitable landscapes. These figures appear eerily displaced, digitally superimposed on island landscapes shot in locations including Capri, Stromboli, Iceland, and Shelter Island, New York. Fittingly, they will now be displayed on an island within an island at Illa del Rei in Menorca. This series evolved from an editorial project for Pop magazine, featuring clothes and accessories Sherman selected from the Chanel archives, ranging from 1920s haute couture designed by Coco Chanel herself to contemporary creations by Karl Lagerfeld.
The sumptuous costumes in the "Ominous Landscapes" series create a striking contrast with the bleak intensity of the surrounding landscapes, while the female figures loom larger than the natural world around them in a reversal of traditional Romantic hierarchy. This project led to the development of Sherman's "Flappers" series (2016-2018), which focuses on young women who challenged social norms and fashions in the 1920s as forms of empowerment, emancipation, and radical modernity. Some of these figures emulate Hollywood stars, posing in glamorous attire with heavy and stylized makeup, while the series also addresses aging by showing protagonists decades past their heyday, seemingly unaware they are past their prime.
The exhibition includes one of Sherman's exceptionally grandiose "Society Portraits" from 2008, where she introduced ornate frames and experimented with green screen technology to create fantasy environments for women of high society. These elaborate backdrops heighten the isolation of Sherman's portrayed characters and focus attention on the heavily made-up women absorbed by their wealth and status. She later adopted the personas of socialites and fashionistas in a 2016 commission for Harper's Bazaar, creating a series of images featuring women in designer clothes and accessories within various landscape settings, experimenting with multiple exposures to duplicate the depicted women and suggest fractured, unstable identities.
At the heart of the exhibition sits a selection of the iconic "Untitled Film Stills," originally conceived as a group of imaginary film stills from a single actress's career. Inspired by 1950s and 60s Hollywood, film noir, B movies, and European art-house films, Sherman's invented characters and scenarios imitated the style of production shots used by movie studios for film publicity. The images evoke certain character types and genres while remaining intentionally ambiguous, leaving space for viewers to imagine their own narratives and even insert themselves into the work.
The early works predating the Film Stills include pieces from Sherman's "Bus Riders" and "Murder Mystery" series, both created in 1976, along with selected "Line Up" images from 1977, all produced while she was still a student at Buffalo State College in upstate New York. The "Bus Riders" embody a range of cultural stereotypes and everyday personalities across American society, utilizing poses, clothing, and facial expressions that bring familiar characters to life. In contrast, the "Murder Mystery" and "Line Up" series display deliberate staginess, overt theatricality, and intentional melodrama in their characters and poses.
Throughout her four-decade career, Sherman's relentless focus on the diversity of womanhood emphasizes the play of difference rather than sameness within gender categories, making the concept of womanhood expansive rather than restrictive. As the 20th-century cult of fame and celebrity has transitioned into the 21st-century context of influencers and social media stars, Sherman's deconstructions of gender, wealth, and privilege remain acutely relevant, revealing how we all construct and perform our identities.
Born in 1954 in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, Cindy Sherman lives and works in New York. Her groundbreaking work has interrogated themes around representation and identity in contemporary media for over four decades, utilizing prosthetics, theatrical effects, photographic techniques, and digital technologies to channel and reconstruct familiar personas in often unsettling ways. "Cindy Sherman. The Women" runs until October 26, 2025, at Hauser & Wirth Menorca, located at Diseminado Illa del Rei, Balearic Islands, Spain.
