“Cindy Sherman. The Women” at Hauser & Wirth Menorca

Cindy Sherman, one of the most influential figures in contemporary art, comes to Spain with a show that gathers some of her most emblematic works. The exhibition “Cindy Sherman. The Women”, organized by the Hauser & Wirth Menorca gallery, traces a journey through four decades of the work of this American photographer, whose unsettling, poetic and profoundly conceptual aesthetic has revolutionized the way we understand identity, gender and the construction of the self through the image.

The aesthetic, poetic and disturbing force of the American photographer Cindy Sherman (1954) has arrived in Spain courtesy of the prestigious international gallery Hauser & Wirth Menorca. The exhibition “Cindy Sherman. The Women” shows a revolutionary period of the artist that spans iconic works from the 1970s up to the year 2010.

Cindy Sherman studied Art at the University of Buffalo in the early 1970s, where she discovered, thanks to a conceptual art teacher, that what matters in artistic photography is that the idea should prevail over technique.

Tomkins, in his book “Lives of Artists”, describes Sherman as a reserved, unpretentious woman who avoids drawing attention to herself and can even feel uncomfortable in the world of artistic formalities, disappearing even from her own openings.

Sherman grew up in Long Island, New York, in a family in which she was the youngest of five siblings. Her father, Charles Sherman, an aeronautical engineer who was cruel, critical and insensitive toward his children, was offset by an understanding and protective mother. She suffered the loss of her brother Frank, to whom she had been very close, the year before he took his own life at 27. But she lived a happy and peaceful childhood in which her fondness for cinema led her to develop a highly creative imagination and a desire to transform herself into “another”. Instead of playing at dressing up as a princess or dreaming of something aesthetically beautiful, she did so by turning herself into monsters, old people or witches. She liked to create narratives and characters out of old clothes.

This taste for transformation has endured over time. She is the model and protagonist of her photographs; they are self-portraits in which she explores questions such as identity and the representation of the different roles of women in society through a diversity of subjectivities. Here a separation occurs between the body as subject and the body as object.

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