Cindy Sherman, Untitled #550, 2010/2012; Chromogenic color print, 153 x 302.3 cm / 60 1/4 x 119 in. © Cindy Sherman, courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

In a recent interview, Cindy Sherman disclosed she was reading the work of Ottessa Moshfegh. In the author’s novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation, one character says: “Soon we’ll be old and ugly. Life is short, you know? Die young and leave a beautiful corpse.” Sherman’s depiction of womanhood, which often veers into the grotesque, contends with this mindset. Her output—produced alone, if aided by prosthetics and digital technologies—has an unsettling bent that increasingly tackles the effect of age on the female body, which even glamorous film stars and well-dressed society women can’t escape. The value of the beautiful corpse versus a life spent ‘old and ugly’ looms over Sherman’s characters, to say nothing of real women in our patriarchal society.

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The longstanding fascination around the artist’s exploration of gender performance and socially constructed personae hasn’t waned. Last year alone, Sherman had solo exhibitions in Belgium at FOMU Fotomuseum Antwerp, in Greece at the Museum of Cycladic Art, in Switzerland at Photo Elysée and in Korea at Espace Louis Vuitton Seoul. Her latest, at Hauser & Wirth’s Menorca location, features work spanning the 1970s to 2010s from eight series. The title “Cindy Sherman. The Women” nods to a 1936 play with an all-female cast written by Clare Boothe Luce; it was a major hit on Broadway at the time and twice-over made into a film. Boothe Luce embodied female success as a writer, society hostess and patron of the arts. “She was someone with multiple identities, so very much [akin to] Cindy Sherman and her subject matter,” Tanya Barson, curatorial senior director at Hauser & Wirth and curator of the show, says at the press preview.

© Observer