Cindy Sherman, or how to be all the women in the world

Vampiresses, lanky students, silver-screen goddesses, Fifth Avenue socialites mutilated by Botox and money, virgins with silicone breasts and oozing nipples, resourceful widows, teenagers on the brink of collapse, or elderly women who seem to have reached their limit... In the privacy of her studio, aided by wigs, prosthetics, makeup, and all kinds of props, Cindy Sherman (New Jersey, 1954) transforms herself into a multitude of characters who seem real, but even though invented, are no less real. It is Sherman herself who poses as a model, does her own makeup, chooses the wig and wardrobe, designs the lighting, creates the atmosphere, hints at a backstory, the action that is approaching or that has just occurred, and finally, shoots.

' Cindy Sherman. The Women ' , Hauser & Wirth Menorca, 2025" width="449">

Her photographs are like single-frame films, which she both directs and stars in, as the late New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl defined them. Today they number in the thousands (she can be both the murderer and the corpse, a sweet old woman crossing the street, or a prostitute waiting for a client who never arrives), and with each one, what many consider the most outstanding American artist of our time reminds us that we are all, in some way, an invention and that our identity depends not only on how we see ourselves, but on how others see us.

Sherman, who doesn't often make public appearances (a curious phenomenon of sightings occurred during an exhibition at MoMA: numerous visitors claimed to have seen her in the galleries, some describing her as a plump woman with a cane, others as a dynamic and sophisticated redhead), has been in Menorca for the last week supervising The Women , the exhibition that her gallery, Hauser & Wirth, opens this Monday on the privileged Illa del Rei, opposite the port of Maó. Although it may seem impossible, this is her first exhibition in Spain since the Reina Sofía dedicated it to her in 1996. And anticipation is high, although she doesn't appear at the press presentation, or perhaps she is somewhere on the floating island, hiding in plain sight or acting incognito.

She can be a vampire, a lanky student, or a botox-mutilated socialite.

As the title, The Women , suggests, borrowed by Commissioner Tanya Barson (former chief curator of the MACBA during Ferran Barenblit’s time) from a play by Clare Boothe later adapted by George Cukor. Sad, scared, anxious, vulnerable, defeated, confused, terrified... There is Sherman in all her disguises and artifice, defying stereotypes, social mores and the absurdities of fashion, leaping from the glamorous to the grotesque, starting with Untitled Film Stills , the series in which she posed as archetypal characters from American B-movies and European art-house films (the femme fatale , the bored housewife, the torpedo-breasted vampiress...), which catapulted her to fame when she moved to New York City in the 1970s.

Sherman, who began disguising herself as a child (she would wander around the neighborhood dressed as an old lady, believing she wouldn't be recognized) and then, when she began working as an assistant in a gallery where she appeared every day in an invented persona, reacted to this easy success—collectors fought over her work—with furious images that insinuated traumatic rape or death by decomposition. "Let's see if they're willing to pay for this," she thought. They did, far more than her colleagues ever dreamed of. These series haven't traveled to Menorca, but instead, her early student works, which she didn't show until 2000, and more recent works of aging stars and tanned matrons playing at being young women, can be seen for the first time in Spain.

Sherman, who for years was the partner of rocker David Byrne, anticipated today's great debates, from appearance in the modern world to post-truth, but she hates selfies (her job is the exact opposite) and has fun on Instagram using the apps people use to make themselves look better to deform her face.