Cindy Sherman at Cycladic: Early Works

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).

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.

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.

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 was born in 1954 in Glen Ridge, New Jersey; she lives and works in New York.

Her ground-breaking photographs have interrogated themes around representation and identity in contemporary media for over four decades. Sherman first turned her attention to photography at Buffalo State College, where she studied art in the early 1970s, and came to prominence in the late 1970s with the Pictures Generation group.

Utilising prosthetics, theatrical effects, photographic techniques and digital technologies, she has channeled and reconstructed familiar personas known to the collective psyche, often in unsettling ways, and has explored the more grotesque aspects of humanity through the lens of horror and the abject. Her later series have also touched on issues from class to aging.

Get the most out of your visit by exploring our landmark exhibition “Cindy Sherman at Cycladic: Early works” through the audio guide available in the Museum’s mobile app.

Download the app free of charge before or during your visit and unlock in-depth narratives on the highlights of the exhibition. The audio guide tour is available in Greek and English.

*Tip: For a better experience bring your headphones with you during your visit.

→ Find the app “Museum of Cycladic Art Guide” on the Apple Store and Google Play

Bilingual catalogue published in Greek and English on the occasion of the exhibition “Cindy Sherman at Cycladic: Early works”. The catalogue gives an overview of the 102 works included in the exhibition alongside installation views of the Stathatos Mansion exhibition spaces.

Preface by Kassandra Marinopoulou, MCA President and CEO, and introduction by Aphrodite Gonou, MCA Contemporary Art Program Advisor. A text on Sherman’s practice by Flavia Frigeri, art historian and curator at the National Portrait Gallery, London, is also included.