Performing Womanhood: Exploring identity and the representation of women in pop culture through the work of Cindy Sherman
By Business Partners | Sep-Oct, 2024

Featuring more than 100 works, Cindy Sherman at Cycladic: Early Works, the artist Cindy’s first solo museum exhibition in Greece, reveals and deconstructs women’s roles and stereotypes, questioning how the representation of women in pop culture has evolved over time, how societal expectations have changed and been contested, and how art can shape and challenge cultural perceptions.

For almost fifty years, Cindy Sherman has explored the construction of identity and the evolving roles and representations of women in pop culture and mass media. Beginning in the mid to late 1970s, Sherman worked at the intersection of photography and performance, establishing herself 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 various characters and caricatures, appropriating female images and stereotypes from television, film and advertising—including seductress, career girl, and housewife—and offering a critique of traditional gender roles and stereotypes.

From 30 May to 4 November 2024, the Museum of Cycladic is offering art lovers in the Greek capital the opportunity to see these striking images in the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in Greece. Titled Cindy Sherman at Cycladic: Early Works, the exhibition features works from the artist’s ground-breaking and influential early series, including Untitled Film Stills (1977-1980), Rear Screen Projections (1980), Centerfolds (1981), and Color Studies (1981-1982).

According to the Museum of Cycladic Art, by displaying Sherman’s work under the same roof as the museum’s world-renowned collection of Cycladic art, this exhibition creates a link between these contemporary explorations of identity and performative womanhood and the famous marble female figurines dating from the 3rd millennium BCE. In its statement, the Museum elaborates: “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

May 30 to November 4, 2024

Museum of Cycladic Art

Stathatos Mansion

1 Irodotou Street and Vas. Sofias Avenue, Athens 10674

T: +30 210 722 8321-3 

cycladic.gr