On the sun-drenched island of Menorca, Hauser & Wirth mounts Cindy Sherman. The Ladies, the artist’s long-awaited solo return to Spain. Now on view by October 26, the exhibition traces her four-decade investigation into the efficiency of femininity, fame and the fractured mirror of identification, serving up a feast of eclectic characters of Sherman‘s personal making.
Like Clare Sales space Luce’s 1936 Broadway play, which the exhibition was named after, Sherman’s The Ladies presents a barbed portrait of ladies’s relationships with each other, dissecting the methods her characters see and are seen by the world round them. Her work probes the roles girls are requested to play, the pictures they inhabit and the numerous gaze(s) that form their self-perception, disrupting the, usually gendered, subject-object binaries that undergird the medium’s traditions in a delightfully unapologetic method to self-portraiture.
That includes early pupil initiatives like Bus Riders and Homicide Thriller (1976), her breakout Untitled Movie Stills (1977–1980) and later sequence similar to Ominous Landscapes (2010), the exhibition charts Sherman’s clairvoyant understanding of visible identification throughout eras. Earlier works parody mid-century cinema and media tropes, whereas later photos toy with concepts of luxurious, growing old and digital artifice, although what’s threaded all through is a persistent critique of performative identification — its illusions, calls for and ever-evolving glamour.
In a time when identification is crafted and consumed by digital feeds and tales, Sherman’s work stays uncannily prescient. Amid this tradition of steady curation, her portraits emerge as clairvoyant warnings, urging us to replicate on what stays beneath the roles we carry out.
Hauser & Wirth Menorca
Diseminado Illa del Rei, S/N, 07700,
Balearic Islands, Spain
