Cindy Sherman Reconsiders Face Value at Hauser & Wirth Menorca
A deep dive into the artist’s parade of personas, four decades in the making.
On the sun-drenched island of Menorca, Hauser & Wirth mounts Cindy Sherman. The Women, the artist’s long-awaited solo return to Spain. Now on view through October 26, the exhibition traces her four-decade investigation into the performance of femininity, fame and the fractured mirror of identity, serving up a feast of eclectic characters of Sherman‘s own making.
Like Clare Booth Luce’s 1936 Broadway play, which the exhibition was named after, Sherman’s The Women presents a barbed portrait of women’s relationships with one another, dissecting the ways her characters see and are seen by the world around them. Her work probes the roles women are asked to play, the images they inhabit and the many gaze(s) that shape their self-perception, disrupting the, often gendered, subject-object binaries that undergird the medium’s traditions in a delightfully unapologetic approach to self-portraiture.
Featuring early student projects like Bus Riders and Murder Mystery (1976), her breakout Untitled Film Stills (1977–1980) and later series such as Ominous Landscapes (2010), the exhibition charts Sherman’s clairvoyant understanding of visual identity across eras. Earlier works parody mid-century cinema and media tropes, while later images toy with ideas of luxury, aging and digital artifice, though what’s threaded throughout is a persistent critique of performative identity — its illusions, demands and ever-evolving glamour.
In a time when identity is crafted and consumed through digital feeds and stories, Sherman’s work remains uncannily prescient. Amid this culture of continuous curation, her portraits emerge as clairvoyant warnings, urging us to reflect on what remains beneath the roles we perform.
Hauser & Wirth Menorca
Diseminado Illa del Rei, S/N, 07700,
Balearic Islands, Spain
