ART CITIES: London-Linder

Linder is renowned for her photography, photomontage, and confrontational performance art which boldly deconstruct gender stereotypes, libidinous desires, and transgressive acts. An active figure in the punk and post-punk scenes of 1970s and 80s Manchester, where she formed the band Ludus in 1978, she gained early recognition with her photomontage for the Buzzcocks single ‘Orgasm Addict’ which combined material sourced from an Argos catalogue and a French erotic magazine.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Modern Art Gallery Archive

Linder’s work has continued to sharpen its focus on striking, playful, and political juxtapositions through imagery taken from a wide range of printed matter including pornographic magazines, dance journals, as well as cookery and horticulture books. In these composite images, faces are hidden behind blooming roses and household appliances, penetrative acts are concealed by montaged objects, and nude figures emerge from behind kitchenware. In this sense, her works play with unconscious associations between normative beauty and aspirational living; products and bodies are brought together, resulting in a tension between revulsion and seduction. At other times, Linder uses her own body like a piece of paper: a site that can be incised to radical ends. She takes cues from the Berlin Dada artists of Weimar Germany, notably collagists Hannah Höch and John Heartfield, as well as Surrealists such as Ithell Colquhoun. A major figure in feminist art both in the UK and internally, for several decades Linder’s work has interrogated the commodification of consumer and sexual appetites and the perverse undercurrents of inherited norms and societal roles. The exhibition “Where the tongue slips it speaks truth”, is Linder’s fourth exhibition with Modern Art Gallery. Linder is widely known for her work across photography, performance, textiles, video and sculpture. For this exhibition Linder focuses on photomontage, the medium she is most internationally known for. 2026 marks fifty years since Linder first used a Swann-Morton medical grade scalpel to cut out magazine images to skewer our accepted and prevailing understanding of representation and gender politics. As throughout her career, the photomontages in this exhibition probe the subjects of commodification, sexualisation and cultural value. The exhibition is built around Greek mythology and the mythologisation of everyday figures. In a new body of work, porcelain figurines are overlaid on top of images of French New Wave actor Brigitte Bardot. The inanimate objects hold Bardot in a game of equivalence, where Bardot becomes frozen in time, alongside these shiny ornaments. In a separate series of photomontages based on Book X of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses”, Linder reflects on Myrrha’s change from woman to tree as a means to escape the advances of her incestuous father Cinyras. Here, Linder combines appropriated pornographic photographs with images from catalogues of Roman sculpture, to stage a stark encounter between sex and power. Recently Linder has started working with professional footballer Miguel Azeez, as both subject and collaborator – here the artist and athlete meet in the zone where music, art and sport overlaps. In another group of works images of Ancient Greek statues and busts are juxtaposed with 20th century domestic objects, bringing the mythological into the everyday, a recurring trope throughout her career. In other examples Linder obfuscates the faces of classical statues with enamel paint, their familiar gazes awakened from centuries of fixity. With a process of automatism, Linder utilises what Ithell Colquhoun refers to as ‘mantic stain-making’ to access what’s hidden underneath the surface of the somatic body. “Where the tongue slips” it speaks truth continues Linder’s longstanding examination of how we process the visual world. The intuitive and reconstructive processes involved in the making of these works expand our perception of the present through the past.

Photo: Linder, Vantage-grounds in the changing chaos, 2025, photomontage, 48 x 48 cm (18 7/8 x 18 7/8 in), © Linder, Photo Modern Art, Courtesy the artist and Modern Art

Info: Modern Art Gallery, 7 Bury Street, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 16/1-21/2/2026, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.modernart.net/