THE MUSEUM OF CYCLADIC ART, ATHENS presents till November 4, 2024, a major exhibition of Cindy Sherman, the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in Greece. 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). Rolex is the exhibition’s main sponsor.

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.

On display is the entirety of Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills (1977–1980) series. Consisting of 70 black-and-white photographs, Untitled Film Stills began after Sherman moved to New York City in 1977, aged 23. Inspired by 1950s and 1960s Hollywood, film noir, B movies and European art-house films, Sherman created images suggestive of the production stills used by movie studios to publicize their films. The images, reminiscent of certain character types and genres, initiated conversations about gender roles, feminism and representation, remaining always intentionally ambiguous and open to interpretations.

In 1980, Sherman turned to color photography to create Rear Screen Projections. Incorporating a technique often used by Alfred Hitchcock, she posed in her studio in front of a large screen, onto which images of various sites were projected. In this way, she gained more control over the final image while extending her dialogue with cinema. The resulting images, in which she continues assuming the role of the model, blur the lines of reality and artifice.

A year later, Artforum commissioned Sherman to create a series for the magazine, which led to Centerfolds (1981). Referencing erotic images found in men’s magazines at the time, this body of work challenged the popular way of consuming images of women, drawing attention to the voyeuristic gaze of the viewer. Even though the magazine never published these photos for fear of public backlash, these are one of Sherman’s most famous series of works.

In the large-scale vertical works of Color Studies (1981–1982), Sherman photographed herself looking directly at the camera, and by extension, at the viewer. As she continued to play with the constructed nature of images of women, her experimentation with color and shadow is prominent. These are, again, invented images that bring to the foreground the fragile boundaries between what is real and what is artificial, covering and revealing the subjects of her shots through shadow and light.

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.

Cindy Sherman and Cycladic Art

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.

Cindy Sherman at Cycladic: Early Works reveals and deconstructs women’s roles and stereotypes, questioning how the representation of women has evolved over time, how societal expectations have changed and been contested, and how art can shape and challenge cultural perceptions.

An archaeological exhibition of small scale in the Neophytou Douka Wing 

Alongside the Cindy Sherman exhibition, in the Neophytou Douka Wing an archaeological exhibition of small scale will be presented, entitled The multifaceted roles of women in Antiquity. Through the permanent exhibitions of the Museum of Cycladic Art. The exhibition is focusing on the multidimensional and multifaceted roles of women in antiquity as recorded through the artefacts of the Museum’s permanent exhibitions. On display will be nine characteristic objects from the Museum’ collections in relation to women, dating from the beginnings of the prehistory of the Cyclades to the Hellenistic period: Marble Cycladic figurines, clay “Tanagra women” or Cypriot priestesses, together with two-dimensional goddesses on vases offer an excellent background on which to examine the timeless female form. A short film highlighting the multifaceted and constantly evolving position of women in antiquity in which selected antiquities narrate the multiple roles of women will also be screened. 

About the artist

Born in 1954 in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, Cindy Sherman lives and works in New York, NY. Her ground-breaking photographs have interrogated themes around representation and identity in contemporary media for over four decades. Coming to prominence in the late 1970s with the Pictures Generation group alongside artists such as Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince and Louise Lawler, Sherman studied art at Buffalo State College in 1972 where she turned her attention to photography. In 1977, shortly after moving to New York, Sherman began her critically acclaimed Untitled Film Stills. A suite of 70 black and white portraits, Untitled Film Stills sees Sherman impersonate a myriad of stereotypical female characters and caricatures inspired by Hollywood pictures, film noir, and B movies. Using a range of costumes, props and backdrops to manipulate her own appearance and to create photographs resembling promotional film images, the series explores the tension between artifice and identity in consumer culture which has preoccupied the artist’s practice ever since.

Sherman continued to channel and reconstruct familiar personas known to the collective psyche, often in unsettling ways. In 1981, the artist created her Centerfolds, a series of photographic double spreads inspired by men’s erotic magazines. Originally commissioned by Artforum, the spreads were subsequently pulled for fear of backlash. Tightly cropped and shot in color, Sherman’s images show her characters in vulnerable and ambiguous states. By the mid to late 1980s, the artist’s visual language began to explore the more grotesque aspects of humanity through the lens of horror and the abject, as seen in works such as Fairy Tales (1985) and Disasters (1986-89). These highly visceral images saw the artist introduce visible prostheses and mannequins into her work, which would later be used in series such as Sex Pictures (1992) to add to the layers of artifice in her constructed female identities. Like Sherman’s use of costumes, wigs, and makeup, their application would often be left exposed. Her renowned History Portraits begun in 1988 used these theatrical effects to break, rather than uphold, any sense of illusion.

Since the early 2000s, Sherman has used digital technology to further manipulate her roster of characters. For the artist’s Clown series in 2003 she added psychedelic backdrops that are at once playful and menacing, exploring the disparity between the exterior persona and interior psychology of her subject. In her Society Portraits (2008) the artist used a green screen to create grandiose environments for women of the upper echelons of society. These digitally manipulated backdrops photographed by Sherman add to the veneer-like charm of the characters that Sherman portrays, heavily made up and absorbed by societal status in the face of aging. Her later works continue to offer a satirical view of the modern obsession with youth and beauty that has been projected onto women for decades. In her series of wall murals from 2010 (installed for her MoMA retrospective in 2012), Sherman features as a number of different characters against a computerized background in ill-fitting wigs, medieval dress, and no makeup, instead using photoshop to alter her facial features. In her Flappers series from 2016, the viewer is confronted with the vulnerability of the aging process in 1920s Hollywood starlets, who pose in glamorous attire from their prime with exaggerated makeup.

In 2017, Sherman began using Instagram to upload portraits that utilize a number of face-tuning apps, morphing the artist into a plethora of protagonists in kaleidoscopic settings. Disorientating and uncanny, the posts highlight the dissociative nature of Instagram from reality and the fractured sense of self in modern society that Sherman has uniquely encapsulated from the outset of her career.

• ‘Cindy Sherman at Cycladic: Early works‘ runs 30 May – 4 November 2024 at the Stathatos Mansion. Ticket prices: €16 & €12 reduced. Guided tour ticket: €19 & €15 reduced. The guided tour ticket is only available online.
• Guided tours: From 13/6 and every Thursday, 13:00 English language tour and 18:00 Greek language tour. Max capacity: 20 persons per tour.
• Opening hours: Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday: 10:00-17:00; Thursday: 10:00-20:00; Sunday: 11:00-17:00; Tuesday: Closed.

• Museum of Cycladic Art Stathatos Mansion is on the corner of Vasilissis Sophias & Irodotou 1 sts. 106 74, Athens. Tel.: (+30) 210 7228321-3;
• For more information visit the museum’s site
• Facebook: @CycladicArtMuseum; Instagram: @cycladic_museum; LinkedIn: The Museum of Cycladic Art.

About the Rolex Perpetual Arts Initiative

Rolex is recognized the world over for its expertise and the quality of its products – symbols of excellence, elegance and prestige. The continuous pursuit of excellence, symbolized by the word ‘Perpetual’, underpins every aspect of the brand’s activities from watchmaking to its partnerships. This commitment to always reach the pinnacle of performance and achievement drives Rolex to support individuals and organizations in the arts and culture, sport and exploration, as well as those who are devising solutions to preserve the planet.

For more than half a century, Rolex has partnered some of the world’s most talented artists and leading cultural institutions to celebrate excellence and contribute to perpetuating artistic heritage, creating a link between the past, present and future. Cindy Sherman has served as an advisor to the Rolex mentoring programme. Through the Rolex Perpetual Arts Initiative, a broad portfolio of arts that extends through music, architecture, cinema and the Rolex mentoring programme, the brand confirms its long-term commitment to global culture. In all these endeavors, Rolex supports artistic excellence and the transmission of knowledge to future generations, who in turns pass on the world’s cultural legacy.

‘Art Scene Athens’ is run by artist/journalist Stella Sevastopoulos. Dedicated to presenting what is happening on the Greek art scene (but not only), and also to giving Greek artists an international voice on the internet. Press releases etc and proposals for features/articles may be sent to stelsevas@yahoo.com. For more on Stella Sevastopoulos’s art, click here