Cindy Sherman: The Women features a selection of the artist’s most famous bodies of work, from the 1970s up until the 2010s
A woman, immaculately dressed up in vintage Chanel, stands against the backdrop of a desolate and isolated landscape. She is a figure at odds with her environment, ruptured and out of place. This is not solely because of the contrast between the luxury of the couture and the lonely, inhospitable surroundings, but because she has been digitally superimposed onto the backgrounds, not really there at all.
Part of Cindy Sherman’s large-scale Ominous Landscape series (2010), the portrait touches on so many of the themes that have come to define Sherman’s work over the last five decades: the construction and performance of identity, the uncanny deconstructions of wealth and privilege, and the cultural stereotypes of femininity. It is also one of the first images you are confronted with when you step into the Hauser and Wirth gallery in Menorca, which is staging a new exhibition, Cindy Sherman: The Women. Her first solo show in Spain in over two decades, it features a selection of the artist’s most famous bodies of work, from the 1970s up to the 2010s.
Rather than presenting her work chronologically, curator Tanya Barson chose to start with the later portraits and move backwards in time so that the viewer travels in reverse. It’s a bold move which means that, via the Ominous Landscape series, and the subsequent Flappers (2016-2018) and Grandiose Society Portraits (2008), we first encounter an older version of Sherman. Women aren’t supposed to age, especially not in front of a camera, and, as an artist who has always used her own body as her canvas, a lot of Sherman’s later work has inevitably confronted what ageing means to women, exploring the sometimes difficult transition. “I, as an older woman, am struggling with the idea of being an older woman,” she told the New York Times in 2016.
“She is looking at how women are having to contort themselves into certain relationships to youth in culture and how women are trapped within a system of the distortion of their own image,” says Barson. The portrayals of these women are not always kind, particularly in the Flappers series where the protagonists – leading ladies of cinema’s Golden Age – are shown decades from their heyday seemingly unaware they are past their prime.
When Sherman emerged in the 1970s, John Berger’s Ways of Seeing posited that men look at women, and women watch themselves being looked at. But for Barson, and Sherman she argues through the exhibition, that’s not the full story. “The gaze is not just men, it’s also female. When women look at other women it can sometimes be tough and critical,” says Barson. “But it’s also supportive, so there’s a real push-pull for me.” It was this relationship that helped inform the title of the exhibition, which takes its name from the 1936 all-female hit play by Clare Boothe Luce. A merciless ensemble piece about women’s interactions with women, the play, its characters and Boothe Luce herself reflect the multifarious kinds of femininities explored by Sherman.
At the centre of the exhibition lies the Untitled Films Stills (1977-1980), through which Sherman first came to widespread attention. The series of black and white photographs synthesises aspects of 1950s and 60s Hollywood, film noir, B movies and European art-house films, with Sherman assuming different female archetypes – pining lover, bored housewife, office bombshell, noir heroine – to challenge and parody restrictive gender roles, and draw attention to how women are moulded to perform one-dimensional, unrealistic stereotypes. Continuing the journey back in time, the viewer next comes to a gallery dedicated to the Bus Riders and Murder Mystery series (1976) and a selection from the Line Up images (1977), all work that Sherman made as a student at Buffalo State College in upstate New York.
In these images, we can already see the beginnings of how Sherman would come to adopt personas, explore themes of gender and identity, and challenge the perpetual objectification of female sexuality. “As a student, in many ways her characterisation is already exact. These photographs are an incredible insight into how quickly she found her subject matter, her theme at the core of her practice, and how utterly brilliant she was as a student,” says Barson.
Spanning decades, series, portrayals of film stars, starlets, society women and fashionistas, the work in this exhibition highlights Sherman’s enduring fascination with how women exist in society as an image of themselves – and the gazes to which they are relentlessly subjected. But through the depiction of these restrictive and stereotypical roles which women are forced into, ultimately Sherman’s work creates a diverse and expansive picture of womanhood, and the many joys and sufferings that we live through every day.
Cindy Sherman: The Women is running at Hauser & Wirth Menorca from 23 June – 26 October 2025.