Cindy Sherman at Cycladic: Early works

Cindy Sherman at Cycladic: Early works brings together more than 100 works, offering a comprehensive view into Sherman’s ground-breaking and influential early series exploring how women are imaged in popular culture, including Untitled Film Stills (1977-1980), Rear Screen Projections (1980), Centerfolds (1981) and Color Studies (1981-1982).

Sherman’s intersection of photography and performance in the late 1970s established her as an artistic pioneer. Working alone in her studio, she took on the roles of makeup artist, hairdresser, stylist and director, and transformed herself into the various characters depicted in her photography. Appropriating female images and stereotypes in television, film and advertising – such as the femme-fatale, career girl and housewife – Sherman’s work offers a critique of traditional gender roles and identity.

Throughout the exhibition, a twenty-minute segment on Cindy Sherman from the film Transformation, a 2009 Art21 production, will be screened. The segment surveys some of her untitled works and the creative process she has been following for more than forty years.

The presence of Sherman’s works under the same roof as the Museum’s renowned collection of Cycladic art, one of the most complete private collections in the world, creates a link with the famous marble female figurines of the 3rd millennium BC, which dominate Cycladic art and have influenced the work of many 20th and 21st century artists. According to most scholars, these figurines represent the great mother-goddess of fertility and rebirth, the goddess who, over the years, changed her form as women did, assuming different and multiple roles. Roles that have been differentiated and redefined and contested; roles that have led to conflicts but which have always remained fundamental to the place of women, from antiquity to the present day.