How women perform identity

23 / 07 / 2025
POR Marisa Fatás

Through poses, costumes and characters drawn from popular culture, Cindy Sherman shows how femininity is constructed and performed. Her exhibition ‘Cindy Sherman. The Women’ at Hauser & Wirth Menorca offers a striking journey through decades of visual explorations into the performance of femininity.

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What does it mean to construct an identity through images, gestures and cultural archetypes? The work of Cindy Sherman offers a powerful response: identity, especially for women, is not something revealed, but something performed. Through her photographs, Sherman exposes the visual codes drawn from film, fashion, advertising and portraiture through which femininity is imagined and inhabited. The exhibition Cindy Sherman. The Women at Hauser & Wirth Menorca brings together key series from the 1970s to the 2010s, offering a rare opportunity to trace how this performance has evolved in her work.

From the early Bus Riders and Murder Mystery series, where she first assumed theatrical roles based on American stereotypes, to the Untitled Film Stills that mimicked mid-century cinema heroines, Sherman reveals how femininity is scripted, rehearsed and visually encoded. These are not self-portraits but characters that point to the constructed nature of identity itself.

Later works complicate this performance through age, class and excess. In Society Portraits and Flappers, she portrays wealthy women and aging beauties, elaborately styled and surrounded by artificial settings, sometimes unaware of the passage of time. The personas become more fractured in her Harper’s Bazaar commission, where women appear duplicated or digitally altered, suggesting a disintegrating sense of self.

Sherman offers multiple perspectives on what it means to be a woman, expanding rather than narrowing the possibilities. She shows that to be a woman is often to become an image of oneself, assembled through layers of cultural expectation and visual tradition. Her work shows that gender is a continuous act rather than an innate fact.

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