Linder

Danger Came Smiling

'I often ponder the most minimal interruption that I can create to totally change the meaning of the original image. It is non-monumental, intimate work made deliberately to draw the viewer in closer! -Linder

This major retrospective spans five decades of Linder's fearlessly independent artistic journey from her beginnings in the 1970s Manchester punk scene to the present day.

Working across performance, textiles, video, photography, and photomontage, Linder weaves together diverse influences from religious art history to modernist pioneers. At the heart of her practice lies a masterful manipulation of found imagery. Her iconic photomontages, sourced from pornography, fashion magazines, and consumer catalogues, dissect and reassemble society's visual stories with surgical precision and provocative humour. In the process, she invites us to see beyond conventional assumptions about gender, identity, and sexuality As Linder notes, her work mixes both charm and menace. 'I like to see how far I can ramp up desire within one image until it becomes grotesquely comic!

This tension between allure and disruption defines her approach in using edgy humor to dismantle and reconstruct images, revealing the artificial nature of society's visual constructs. Upending traditional notions of glamour, she confronts the politics of domination underlying them. Her work invites us to look beyond the superficial, questioning our relationship with pictures while offering new possibilities for understanding how social identity and relations of power are reinforced through everyday imagery.

Untitled

1976

Photomontage

Tate. Purchased 2007

This is one of a series of works made by Linder in the late 70s that recombines images from fashion and homemaking magazines in ways that subvert engrained societal assumptions about the role and desires of women.

Through Linder's introduction of images featuring mechanical consumer goods, the intimate domestic setting depicted in this work is transformed into a dystopian landscape of surveillance and dominance.

Linder has recently described this work as prophetic in that it prefigures the contemporary business of live-streaming content made from the privacy of a bedroom for a paying online audience.

GRAMMAR

I select imagery with my scalpel and I make my mark.'

While a student of graphic design at Manchester Polytechnic in 1976, Linder abandoned drawing and painting in favour of photomontage, working with images from magazines aimed at 'women's interests' (fashion, homemaking, romance) and 'men's interests' (cars, DIY, pornography).

Her distinctive visual style drew on various traditions from art history, and also reflected the iconoclastic atmosphere of the punk music scene in Manchester. Linder made her first photomontages for posters, flyers and record covers for bands, as well as for publication in zines. Several are exhibited here, including her iconic image for the Buzzcocks' debut single Orgasm Addict (1977) and photomontages made for The Secret Public

(1978), a fanzine created with music writer Jon Savage, published by New Hormones.

Inspired by recent feminist writings, Linder's work from this period undermined traditional gendered associations of domesticity, romance and desire. Using a surgical scalpel Linder cut out images of female bodies found in women's magazines, romantic novels and soft pornography, and recombined them in photomontages that derail the usually dominant role of the male gaze in consumer culture, subverting it with satirical effect.

Pretty Girls

1977

Archival pigment prints

24 parts

Private collection

Cyborg-like, with consumer products for heads, the

'pretty girls' in this series are the same woman, who has been photographed performing classic 'pin-up' poses in a simple domestic scene. The eroticised coffee pot, electric fire, record player and other items masking the model's face remind us of how sexual desire is manipulated by advertising and redirected towards consumption. Masking the model's facial expressions, these montaged elements remove any semblance of individuality and expose how the pornographic figure is likewise presented as a passive consumer object.

The original photomontages are contained within the magazine, which is exhibited alongside photographs of each page.

Untitled

1976

Photomontage

Tate. Purchased 2007

Linder combines a glossy, sexualized female body with unexpected elements - a steam iron replacing her head and smiling faces where her nipples would be.

Created for the cover of the Buzzcocks' debut single Orgasm Addict in 1977, this provocative composition uses humour and shock to call out, and to counter, the dehumanizing ways women are portrayed in commercial imagery.

GLAMOUR

I started to play with glamour to rewire it, to engineer it.'

In the 18th Century, to 'cast a glamour' meant to cast a spell of enchantment. Growing up in the northwest of England in the 1950s and 1960s, Linder was drawn to the 'incredibly glamorous Liverpool women around her. Although their dress code of 'lipstick and a bullet bra' didn't align with the aesthetics of feminist empowerment, their glamorous transformation of gender and social class had a subversive power.

Linder later experienced firsthand the way that punk, new wave and new romantic subcultural scenes subverted traditional gender styles. She embraced this freedom of expression as a form of 'self-montage,' in which the power of glamour could be redirected to reimagine images of self and status. This is a subject she explored in her photographs of working-class drag clubs in 1970s Manchester, and also in portraits capturing her own physical transformation through bodybuilding in the early 1980s.

Linder often works with 'glamour photography' (a euphemism coined by British pornographer Harrison Marks in the late 1950s), turning this kind of 'glamour' inside out to reveal its role as a cover for the misogynistic portrayal of women as passive objects of male pleasure. In Linder's hands, these photographs are transformed with an empowered glamour of their own.

Art and Industry VI

Art and Industry IX

Both 2022

Photomontage

Courtesy of BLUM Los Angeles, Tokyo, New York

The movements of the athletic bodies in these photographs, taken from a folio published in Germany in 1939, are interrupted by images from art historian Herbert Read's book, Art and Industry: The Principles of Industrial Design (1934). In covering the faces of the naked models with pictures of industrial objects, Linder seems to draw a parallel between the design of products and the idealised body imagery associated with the fascist aesthetics of 1930s Germany, drawing attention to the role that desire plays in politics and design as well as dissent.

Magnitudes of Performance XIV

Magnitudes of Performance IV

Magnitudes of Performance I Magnitudes of Performance VI

All 2012

Photomontage

Courtesy of Modern Art, London

In these works Linder combines gay pornographic photographs from the 1970s with advertising images of expensive watches, taps and furniture that stand in for queer sexual acts, describing a lustful relationship towards bodies and objects alike. In contrast to the highly standardised images in commercial heterosexual pornography, Linder was interested in the erotic charge and freedom granted to gay pornography that operated outside of the heterosexual mainstream aesthetics.

Created for Gayhouse, an art journal expressing visions of gay identity, this series acts as a queer analogy to Linder's earlier work, Pretty Girls (1977).

All four works are

Untitled

1977

C-Type prints from original negatives

Courtesy of Modern Art, London

Often drawn to communities that operated on the margins of society, Linder began attending small working-class drag clubs in the mid-1970s. These photographs depict an annual drag competition at Dickens Club in Manchester, and a drag night at a pub in Salford.

Linder's photographs show her subjects in intimate backstage portraits as they carefully prepare their appearance, as well as joyfully out in the club in full regalia and persona. The theatrical and transformative nature of glamour embodied by these men echoed deeply with Linder's own experience growing up in working-class Liverpool.

She/She

1981

14 parts

Photography by birrer

Courtesy of Modern Art, London

Silver bromide photographs from original negatives

This series comprises fourteen black and white photographs, nine of which are portraits of Linder made in collaboration with Swiss photographer birrer. The remaining five photographs feature typewritten excerpts of song lyrics from Linder's band Ludus that reference hiding, searching and finding.

These images originally accompanied the cassette release of Ludus' EP Pickpocket (1981). The subject of the lyrics is echoed in Linder's poses that explore the fluidity of identity through display and concealment. Dressed in her mother's pearls and a friend's cast-off dress, Linder plays with the artifice of self-representation; describing this work as a form of 'self montage, she positions herself as a critical participant in the creation of her own public image.

SEDUCTION

'To be trained in glamour was often also to be trained in the art of seduction.'

The word 'seduction' originally meant 'to lead astray' and as Linder notes,

'We all need to stray away from well-trodden paths from time to time!

As a child, the artist collected ballet annuals. She was seduced by images of beautiful dancers and the fantasy world of the stage. This kind of seduction led Linder into an imaginary space in which she could escape from an abusive relationship within her wider family.

The seductive pin-up models on the magazine covers and pages in the works shown here are obscured with flowers that traditionally convey sympathy and condolences as well as lustful or romantic intentions. Several works in this room were made while Linder was caring for or grieving for her late parents. The physical states of illness and death, as well as the strong emotions that surround them, are often experienced as a loss of control.

Linder explored those psychological states by experimenting with techniques in which she cedes complete control over the image-making process. In several series, acrylic and enamel paint form alluring pools of swirling colour over found images; in these works, the artist does not direct the paint herself but allows it to be led astray. In a series of photographs which call to mind the messy fetish practice of 'sploshing, Linder and a friend are covered in the kind of liquid food that can be spoonfed. Brightly coloured, it transforms them into living paintings, queering the legacy of machismo abstract expressionism via the kitchen.

By placing traditionally romantic flowers over the body parts of pornographic models, Linder derails the intent of the original images. Instead of depicting people as products available to service the sexual fantasies of viewers, pornographic images are transformed in Linder's work - through this 'migration of symbols' - into strange hybrid combinations of human and flower that open up a range of possible new meanings. While flowers have sentimental as well as commemorative associations, it is also worth recalling that they are the sexual organs of the plant world, their beauty designed to attract bees to spread the flowers' pollen and ensure their reproduction.

Post-mortem: Tamara (i)

2016

Private collection, Stockholm

Post-mortem: Irina (i)

2016

Courtesy of Modern Art, London

Post-mortem: Yura

2019

Private Collection

Photomontage

Photographs from the book Baron at the Ballet (1950) are partially obscured by carefully dissected marine specimens. These works were made in two distinct periods while Linder was caring for her parents, shortly before each of their deaths. They draw on imagery that had soothed Linder as a child, but the otherworldly shells and sea creatures have an unsettling effect in these pictures.

Glorification de l'Élue

[Glorification of the Chosen One]

2011

C-Type print on FuijiFlex crystal archival paper

Courtesy of Modern Art, London

Danse Sacrale (L'Élue)

[Sacrificial Dance]

2011

C-Type print on FuijiFlex crystal archival paper

Courtesy of Modern Art, London

Action Rituelle des Ancêtres

[Ritual Action of the Ancestors]

2011

Wall vinyl

Courtesy of Modern Art, London

Inspired by her discovery of a fetish magazine dedicated to the practice of 'sploshing', in which people are covered in food and everyday household substances, this series of photographs documents Linder and a friend as they smear their bodies with food and liquids. With mouths open in ambivalent expressions of pleasure or disgust, their sticky embrace blurs the boundaries between the self and other.

For Linder, the work explores memories of caring for and feeding her father - a strong and stoic figure who became reliant on her care before his death. Through this playful performance for the camera, she explores her experiences of caregiving in relation to the vulnerability and dependence that plays out in the practice of this sexual fetish

CUT

"The scalpel that l use cuts through paper and time with equal ease'

In filmmaking, 'cut' marks the end of a shot or a scene. The term is taken from the physical cut made to celluloid film as it is spliced together in the editing room, a process not unlike Linder's approach to working with printed images. For Linder the cut is a transformational act. By severing images from their original contexts, she makes cuts in time, revealing links between the past and present.

In some recent photomontages, Linder has explored myths and fairy tales related to the status and roles of women. Several works here were inspired by the myths of Pygmalion, Myrrha and Adonis, which tell stories of love and beauty linked by an act of incest. For deceptively seducing her father, Myrrha was turned into a tree by the Gods - a hybrid state echoed in imagery of plants and animals that are combined with bodies in these works to create new, abstract pictures.

Linder also explores variants of the Cinderella story, which appear across the world and originate in the ancient Chinese folk tale Ye Xian.

Weaving 'rags to riches' stories into her assemblages of pornography and interiors, Linder links the contemporary fascination for physical transformation through drastic makeovers with the pursuit of feminine beauty and romantic love in these age-old fairy tales.

Did he prefer her to us?

2023

Photomontage

Photography by Hazel Gaskin

Courtesy of Modern Art, London

This portrait of Mia Khalifa was taken in the church of St Mary Magdalene. Khalifa had spoken at the Oxford Union the previous evening, reflecting on her experiences as an actor in the adult entertainment industry, and describing the personal boundaries that she has since learned to use to protect herself.

Khalifa wears Linder's own breastplate, acquired when she took up boxing for self-defence. This image conveys the strength and vulnerability of Khalifa, who now uses her public platform to advocate for greater regulation.

Linder, The Most Sacred Monster of Photomontage in Her Time

2025

Photomontage

Portrait of Linder by Benoit Hennebert

Courtesy of dépendance, Brussels

The title refers to Salvador Dali's Shirley Temple: The Youngest, Most Sacred Monster of the Cinema in Her Time (1939), in which Dali collaged a photograph of the child actor's head onto the body of a sphinx to highlight the film industry's sexualisation of its child stars.

Linder's photomontage alludes to the 'deepfaking' of sexually explicit images, in which faces taken from social media profiles are digitally pasted onto the bodies of pornographic models. Here Linder has 'deepfaked' herself, combining an image of her face with the naked body of a Playboy centrefold. The scissors refer to her five decades of cutting up photographs, whilst the fork symbolises her skewering of male chauvinist attitudes.

As Linder notes, I've been deepfaking women all of my adult life to restore agency to each model.'

Saint Reginfledis

2020

Glass installation

Courtesy of Modern Art, London

The Ultimate Form (costumes)

2013

Ballet costumes designed by Richard Nicoll

Courtesy of Modern Art, London

These three costumes -The Groom, The Bride, The Youth - were worn by characters in Linder's 2013 ballet, The Ultimate Form. Linder created the work with choreographer Kenneth Tindall from Northern Ballet and fashion designer Richard Nicholl. Inspired by Barbara Hepworth's sculpture The Family of Man (1970), the work signified a shift in Linder's role from performer to orchestrator. In these costumes, fabric, texture and pattern are used to create, as Nicoll commented,

'a surreal sense of visual trickery, which Linder saw as an extension of the body and of the collaging of the self in real-time.

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