Cindy Sherman is a master storyteller. During a five-decade career, she has acted as her own model, constructing identities and occupying different personas for arresting, revealing photographs. By drawing on a distinctive blend of prosthetics, digital devices and theatrical tools, Sherman presents recognisable caricatures, tropes familiar to us from the movies, and from life – the society hostess, the unfulfilled housewife - stereotypes she presents, confronts, and dismantles.
Throughout, artifice is key. In Sherman’s photographs, we can often see the working. The wig may be a little askew, there are visible cracks in the foundation on the thickly made-up face. Sometimes, you can spot the safety pin, holding together the front of the dress.
Sherman builds on a lifetime spent constructing the finer details in her new ‘Fabric Matrons’ series, now on show at Hauser & Wirth in London. Here, Sherman’s women drape themselves in thick swathes of material, recline in front of hanging reams of fabric or pose for the camera, dripping in jewels.
The results are a sumptuous mediation on what it means to age; how we embrace it, how we mask it, or how we make the best of it. For her portrayals, Sherman was inspired by the pages of a glossy magazine she came across at a store in the Hamptons, its pages filled with women of her age whose wrinkled faces had been smoothed over. She has recreated these women’s glamour with a tactile reimagining of what it means to present a different face to the world.
The material looks expensive, befitting of who these women have become. Sherman was invited by Chanel to utilise their fabrics and jewellery, which appear in some of the works, building on a relationship begun in 2010-2012 with Sherman’s Ominous Landscapes series, in which her characters wore gowns from Chanel’s archives. The Chanel tweeds here, woven through with glinting gold threads, sequins and slivers of leather, are gloriously rich in their clashes of patterns and textures, creating rich contrasts between the gloriousness of the material and the casual, slapdash way it is styled. Bows are roughly tied and hems are frayed. Tailoring is eschewed for shapeless gowns which wouldn’t look incongruous on a member of the aristocracy - or on a peasant.
It is a juxtaposition that simmers throughout. Some of Sherman’s characters here are almost airbrushed in their youthfully clear complexions; others gaze at the camera, their faces, criss-crossed by lines, emphasised by the close crop of the portrait.
Says Sherman: ‘It’s gone beyond beauty. I think it’s showing these characters’ neuroses – probably my own, and similar to many women my age.’
Cindy Sherman at Hauser & Wirth London from 13 October – 23 December 2026