Cindy Sherman’s “Fabric Matrons” at Hauser & Wirth London: Ageing, Glamour and the Art of Disappearing

Cindy Sherman has spent her career proving that a photograph of a woman is never just a photograph of a woman — it is a costume, a script and a set of expectations. Her newest series pushes that idea somewhere quietly radical: towards the moment a person begins to vanish into her surroundings. Cindy Sherman: Fabric Matrons at Hauser & Wirth London, on view at 23 Savile Row from 13 October to 23 December 2026, is the first time the series has been shown anywhere.

Cindy Sherman’s Fabric Matrons: camouflage as portrait

The device at the centre of the new work is fabric. Draped cloth functions both as costume and as backdrop, so that Sherman’s characters seem to merge with the space behind them. Pattern bleeds into pattern; a sleeve becomes a wall. For some scenes, at Chanel’s invitation, Sherman worked with the house’s archival textiles and jewellery — tweeds woven with leather, gold thread and sequins — materials that carry decades of fashion history in their weave.

The prints are chromogenic colour photographs, all dated 2026, titled in Sherman’s usual way as numbered Untitled works (the gallery shows, among others, Untitled #701, #704, #705, #706 and #710). Each is a separate character, not a chapter in a story.

The argument: who gets to be seen?

According to the gallery, the series considers identity as something built up over a lifetime, and the ways women manage their own visibility as they grow older. That is a sharp subject for an artist who has always been her own model. Some figures here have skin that looks almost airbrushed; others carry the evidence of age openly. Placed side by side, they expose the double standard that lets men age into authority while women are expected either to resist time or quietly withdraw from view.

The camouflage effect therefore reads two ways. It can be a defence — blending in as a strategy — or a symptom: the older woman literally absorbed by her décor, present but unregistered. Sherman, characteristically, does not tell us which.

A glossy magazine as starting point

The press materials trace the series to an unlikely source: a glossy giveaway magazine from a store in the Hamptons, filled with airbrushed images of a model of Sherman’s own generation. That polished vision of ageing well became the template to subvert. Sherman borrows the language of the fashion editorial — the lighting, the poses, the luxury textiles — in order to puncture it from inside.

Her method has not changed in essentials. She works without a script, starting with fabric and wigs until a character begins to emerge, and only then adds make-up. The person in the picture is discovered rather than planned.

Where the series sits in Sherman’s career

Born in 1954 in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, and based in New York, Sherman became one of the defining figures of the Pictures Generation with the Untitled Film Stills of the late 1970s, and has since worked through history portraits, clowns, society women and digitally manipulated characters. Fabric Matrons has a direct ancestor: the Ominous Landscapes of 2010–12, which also used pieces from the Chanel archive. Where those works placed figures in vast, eerie environments, the new series collapses figure and environment into one surface.

For London visitors, the timing is generous. The gallery’s second Savile Row presentation in the same period is Lorna Simpson’s Previous & Ongoing (also 13 October – 23 December), making a visit a double encounter with two artists who have reshaped how photography handles identity.

Why it matters

• For photographers: a masterclass in using textile, pattern and colour to dissolve the boundary between subject and ground.
• For painters: these images borrow freely from portrait painting’s conventions of drapery and pose — worth studying as compositions, not just as conceptual statements.
• For collectors: the debut of a new Sherman series is a significant market event, and a first showing in London rather than New York is notable.

Visiting information

Hauser & Wirth London, 23 Savile Row, London W1S 2ET. 13 October – 23 December 2026. Tuesday–Saturday 10am–6pm. Phone +44 (0)20 7287 2300, [email protected]. See the official exhibition page, our Cindy Sherman listing, and Upcoming Art Exhibitions in Leading Galleries for more openings in London and beyond.