Cindy Sherman is a star. But a star who never shows herself as she truly is. For nearly fifty years, she has only appeared in disguise, transformed, disguised as a thousand characters: B-movie actress, faded socialite, flapper Nonconformist of the Roaring Twenties or heroine of a film noir. With her, art becomes one with the grand theater of appearances. 

This summer, Hauser & Wirth Menorca is dedicating a major retrospective to the American artist: "The Women." It's her first solo exhibition in Spain in over twenty years. Her legendary series are featured: the Untitled Film Stills (1977-1980), black and white photographs in which Sherman single-handedly reenacts an entire chapter of film history; but also rarer works, such as the Bus Riders et Murder Mystery, created in 1976, when she was still a student. Already, we sense this desire to blur the lines, to blend into identities that only exist through images.

The title of the exhibition is not insignificant: it comes from the play The women Clare Boothe Luce's 1936 film, a scathing satire of relationships between women, has been adapted for the screen twice. Sherman sees it as a mirror held up to our societies, where the codes of femininity have been constantly reinterpreted, from yesterday's Hollywood to today's social media. And this is precisely where her work remains strikingly relevant: it anticipates the logic of selfies, of identities crafted for the screen, of lives staged to be seen.

Some works engage directly with fashion and luxury. In the Ominous Landscapes (2010), she used costumes drawn from the Chanel archives – from Coco to Karl Lagerfeld – to create timeless figures, set within grandiose and unsettling landscapes. Later, with the flappers (2016-2018), she imagines these young women of the 1920s, figures of freedom and modernity, whom she depicts as aged but still well-groomed, as if clinging to the illusion of eternal youth. As for the Society Portraits (2008), they show solitary bourgeois women, frozen in ostentatious luxury, isolated in their cardboard-cutout setting.

What Sherman highlights is our contemporary condition: that of individuals who define themselves by the image they project. She reveals the fragility of these identities in perpetual performance, caught between the desire for recognition and the fear of disappearing.

And as if to extend the experience, the exhibition includes an Education Lab, in partnership with ESADIB, where the public is invited to test the "plasticity of identity" themselves through participatory theater. This serves as a reminder that what Sherman has been exploring since the 1970s—blurring the line between role and reality—has become our daily experience, constantly playing out on our screens.

Born in 1954 in New Jersey, Cindy Sherman lives and works in New York. She belongs to that generation of artists, along with Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, and Louise Lawler, who understood before many others how much images shape our lives; and that they can also, through art, be deconstructed, subverted, and reinvented.

“Cindy Sherman.” The Women »
Hauser & Wirth Menorca
Illa del Rei, Mahon, Menorca (Spain)
From June 23 to October 26, 2025

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