Cindy Sherman, art chameleon for the first time in Greece

“Cindy Sherman in the Cycladic: Early Works” is the title of the first exhibition in Greece of the famous American photographer organized by the Museum of Cycladic Art from May 30 to November 4, 2024 at Megaro Statato.

The exhibition will feature more than one hundred works by Cindy Sherman from her early photo series Untitled movie clips (1977-1980), as well as from serials Back screen projections (1980), Central folds (1981) and Color studies (1982).

Sherman transforms herself into different fictional characters that she captures in different places, taking on all the roles needed to create her own works. Focusing on women, their identity and image, the exhibition explores through the characters of Sherman's works a wide range of female stereotypes and poses questions that always remain relevant.

Cindy Sherman was born in 1954 in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, New York. He lives and works in New York. For more than four decades, her subversive images have explored issues of representation and identity in modern media. Sherman came to prominence in the late 1970s as a member of the art group Pictures Generation alongside artists such as Sheri Levin, Richard Prince, and Louise Lawler.

She turned to photography while studying at Buffalo State College in the early 1970s, and in 1977, shortly after moving to New York, she began her world-famous series of 70 untitled black-and-white film stills. In this series, Sherman embodies many stereotypical female characters inspired by Hollywood images, film noir, and B-movies.

Using different costumes and props to alter her appearance and creating photographic images resembling film promotional images, the artist explores the relationship between artifice and identity in consumer culture, something that has occupied her practice ever since.

Sherman's pioneering work has explored issues of representation and identity in contemporary media for more than four decades. Since the early 2000s, she has constructed characters using digital manipulation, reflecting her increasingly fragmented sense of self within 21st century society.

Her groundbreaking and influential series of photographs from 1985, which provided the opportunity for several generations of artists to reconsider photography as a medium.

Created over forty years ago, these powerful and enigmatic works are landmarks of contemporary art and continue to inspire and influence its trajectory.

Alongside the exhibition, a series of lectures and discussions will focus on issues that Sherman has managed with astonishing fortitude and imaginative power to explore so obsessively, giving us strange images of the self that worries and contemplates, turns beyond all limits and tests its endurance.