A Cindy Sherman retrospective – and a rare interview with the artist herself
CINDY SHERMAN AT CYCLADIC Early works Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens, until November 4
IF THERE IS A SINGLE PICTURE that captures the mysteries of Cindy Sherman, the subject of a stirring new retrospective at the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens, it is “#48” from her 1977–80 series Untitled Film Stills – a platinum blonde in bobby socks and sneakers, waiting by a dusty roadside with her suitcase in the gathering dark.
Like the other images in this seventy-strong series, it deploys every trick and trope in the Hollywood rulebook to prick the viewer’s imagination: foreboding clouds, a bend in the road that obscures what’s coming, the implied gaze of whoever is behind the subject. If the picture had sound, an ill wind would be rustling in those pine trees. The urge to speculate is instinctive and overwhelming. What led the girl here? What will happen to her? “To me it seemed a natural thing to want to leave things kind of ambiguous and unexplained”, says Sherman – we spoke at the museum, in a rare interview.
Sherman, who is seventy, has spent a lifetime turning herself into other people and photographing the results. She was barely out of art school in Buffalo, New York state, when she made the Stills, but they caught attention almost from the start. The series felt emblematic, perhaps, a repository for the preoccupations of that era. In 1996 MoMA acquired a full set for as much as $1.5 million – an extraordinary seal of approval – though today a single print would easily be double (“#48” sold for $2,965,000 in 2015).
A full set also kicks off this exhibition in Athens, which principally examines Sherman’s early pieces, but also puts her work in rewarding dialogue with ancient Greek sculpture in the museum’s permanent collection, minimalist marble figurines from the Cyclades islands, made between 3000 BC and 2000 BC and distinguished by their wedge noses, folded arms and blank, upward-turned faces. Nearly all of the figurines depict women – Cycladic culture celebrated them – so that the adjunct display of them, which also features vases and clay priestesses from Cyprus, builds a pathway back to a time of female empowerment that lends Sherman’s work a new and moving resonance.
She saw an exhibition of Cycladic art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2023. “It blew my mind”, she tells me. “It’s ancient, yet the work is so modern and contemporary. It was a matriarchal society. I didn’t know that. The women were kind of fetishized … It’s hard for me to be objective about my early work, to see it with fresh eyes. But this setting does make me appreciate the symbolism of some of the character
