Artist: Cindy Sherman

Cindy Sherman is globally renowned for her exploration of identity and gender through the performance of meticulously observed personas for the camera. For her first solo exhibition in Spain in over two decades, ‘Cindy Sherman. The Women’ features a selection of the artist’s most iconic bodies of work, dating from the 1970s to 2010s, and emphasising how Sherman revolutionized the role of the camera in artistic practice.

The exhibition includes the groundbreaking ‘Untitled Films Stills’ (1977 – 1980), through which Sherman came to widespread notoriety as one of the ‘Pictures Generation’, artists whose work responded to the age of mass media and celebrity. This pivotal series will be juxtaposed with Sherman’s large-format portrayals of film stars, starlets, society women and fashionistas, from various series made over subsequent decades, addressing the layered presentation and public perception of femininity.

The exhibition takes its title from the 1936 all-female hit play by Clare Boothe Luce, a merciless ensemble piece about women’s interactions with women, of their own and different classes, and of appearances. 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 of acute relevance. This exhibition offers a rare presentation of Sherman’s enduring concern with the interaction between female roles and images, with the diversity of womanhood, and the gaze(s) to which women are relentlessly subjected.

Cindy Sherman
Cindy Sherman was born in 1954 in Glen Ridge, New Jersey; she lives and works in New York. Her ground-breaking photographs have interrogated themes around representation and identity in contemporary media for over four decades. Sherman first turned her attention to photography at Buffalo State College, where she studied art in the early 1970s, and came to prominence in the late 1970s with the Pictures Generation group.

Utilising prosthetics, theatrical effects, photographic techniques and digital technologies, she has channeled and reconstructed familiar personas known to the collective psyche, often in unsettling ways, and has explored the more grotesque aspects of humanity through the lens of horror and the abject. Her later series have also touched on issues from class to aging.