Linder

Overview

Linder, The Ursuline Order, 2023, Photomontage, 43 x 37 cm

Linder is an internationally celebrated artist who applies the principles of collage to the visual languages of graphic design, popular culture, fashion and fine art in the production of photomontages, performances and installations. The core of her work is a continuous exploration of desire, cultural expectations and the female body as commodity. Occasionally referring to her works as biopsies Linder’s collages manipulate, disrupt and play with porn and glamour, exposing the latter as something we should be wary of. Examining the way that women are depicted across visual culture, these collages draw attention to institutionalised misogyny. Denouncing the artificiality of groomed and tame femininity and revealing the performative aspects of gendered and social differences, the works are sometimes provocative – and also funny.

Linder has worked with the pornographic image for four decades, often montaging the images from pornographic magazines with those that she finds in interior design and fashion publications, the common denominator in all three being the depiction of the female body. Her work is often forensic in its approach, a visual enquiry into who, what, where, why and how the images that we see around us have been constructed.

Linder, born 1954 in Liverpool, initially rose to fame as an artist and musician in the punk/post-punk arts and music scene in Manchester in the mid 1970s. Linderism, a retrospective accompanied by a catalogue has been on view at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge and the Hutton Gallery, University of Newcastle in 2020-2021. She has in recent years also presented two large-scale outdoor installations for the Liverpool Biennial (2021) and for Art on the Underground, Southwark Station, London (2018-2020). Selected notable past solo-exhibitions include Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham (2018); Glasgow Women’s Library (2018); Chatsworth, Derbyshire (2018); Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris, France (2013); Tate St Ives, Cornwall (2013); Chisenhale Gallery, London (2010); and Museum of Modern Art/PS1 (2007). Linder was awarded the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award in 2017.

In 2025-2026, Linder’s critically acclaimed retrospective Danger Came Smiling is currently touring multiple institutions across the UK after having been premiered at the Hayward Gallery in London. It is accompanied by an extensive monograph, and marks her third retrospective, following Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2012) and Kettle’s Yard (2020). Linder’s continued institutional recognition affirms the canonical status her photomontages hold today.

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Exhibitions