Linder Sterling (a.k.a. Linder) is most notably known and celebrated for her provocative collage and performance practice that has consistently challenged gender binaries, tradition, and history over the course of five decades. In 2017, she was named the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Awardee.
Read MoreBorn Linda Mulvey in Liverpool U.K, she adopted the identity of Linder Sterling while studying Graphic Design at the Manchester Polytechnic in the 1970s. During this time, Linder became a key figure in Manchester's punk and post-punk scenes as she created posters, flyers, record sleeves, and covers for bands and events, as well as zines with her iconic collage style. It was at this time that she formed Ludus, a new wave and avant garde band.
In 1977, Linder's artwork was used for the cover sleeve of Buzzcock's debut single, Orgasm Addict. In this work, Linder had superimposed various elements from men's and women's magazines, replacing a nude woman's head with an iron and her nipples with smiling mouths. Linder points at the commonplace use of a woman's body in magazines and advertisements, saying that she made the collage to 'highlight the various cultural monstrosities that she felt was present at the time.'
Linder's iconic and provocative style was influenced by the gender specificity of media. In her early work, Linder remarks on the gendered nature of popular magazines—with cars, home improvement, and pornography marketed for male audiences and beauty, fashion, and cooking towards women. Linder's works have consistently questioned and critiqued the gender binary, the male gaze, and the commodification of women by arranging elements from her source material into new juxtapositions.
Inspired by second-wave feminism and seminal texts such as Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch (1970), Linder created radical performance and activist-oriented works to address the politics of sex and gender inequalities. She has often used herself as subject and performer throughout her artistic practice. Earlier self-portraiture works like her 'SheShe' series (1981) involve Linder covering parts of her face with cling film, bandages, and torn pages of mouths from magazines to address the painful stereotypes affecting women. In 1982, during a Ludus performance, Linder wore a dress made of chicken flesh, pulling it up to reveal a black dildo to address both selling meat products and the venue's routine screening of pornography. This trajectory can also be seen in her ballet The Ultimate Form (2013), she choreographed sensual and explicit movements to subvert the norms of ballet as a tradition.
In the past, Linder has also referenced female historical figures in her work. While the figures are anonymous in Your Actions Are My Dreams (2009), where Linder embodies an enchantress, her two ballets The Ultimate Form (2013) and Children of the Mantic Stain (2016) both reference key female artists, Barbara Hepworth and Ithell Colquhoun. Apart from these, the artist's 2018 retrospective The House of Fame at Nottingham Contemporary also included the work of other female artists who have inspired her practice, yet who have been overlooked by history.
Linder's collage style is known to be precise and deliberate as she carefully and neatly extracts flowers, mouths, and eyes from her source material. While beginning her artistic career through the punk ethos of collaging and zine making, Linder's practice of assemblage has since expanded to encompass different media and forms such as music, performance, and film.
In her performance works, Linder injects her photomontage sensibilities by intermingling several elements such as textiles, conceptual dance, and prints. In 2013, Linder, with Kenneth Tindall of Northern Ballet, choreographed The Ultimate Form for the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. This performance—the first the artist was not directly involved with—can be likened to an assemblage as she brought together several collaborators for a single project.
In a similar vein, Linder's 2018 film and flag Bower of Bliss involved the collaboration of dancers, musicians, and artists to create a work referencing Queen Mary of Scots. This film, with its colourful costumes, ethereal cinematography, and surreal scenes, was shot in Queen Mary's Bower in Chatsworth, where she was detained for 15 years.
Linder continues to make collages, though has adapted a more fluid approach. This departure can be seen in The Sphinx (2021), where superimposed faces seem to melt into each other. In an interview with Artnet, Linder elaborates on the development of her collage practice saying: 'I've liberated my cuts so that they no longer faithfully follow the outlines of each motif [...] I invite chance and an absence of control into my process far more often now.'
In 2018, Art on the Underground commissioned Linder to create an 85-metre-long billboard at Southwark Station, London. She spent four months in residence at Southwark to study the vertical history of the area.
Taking source material from Southwark Council's Cuming Museum Collection, the London Transport Museum Collection, and Transport for London's lost property office, Linder created a massive photomontage to cover the façade of the station. She was additionally commissioned to create the cover for the 29th edition of the pocket Tube map. Her work was on display at Southwark Station until May 2020.
Linder has held solo exhibitions at MoMA PS1, New York; Chisenhale Gallery, London; Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Kunstall Oslo; and Glasgow Women's Library. Linderism, her first institutional survey in the UK travelled from Kettle's Yard in Cambridge to Hatton Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne in 2020, while her retrospective, femme/objet, travelled from Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris to Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover in 2013. Linder's first major retrospective in London will take place at the Hayward Gallery in 2025.
Linder's work has been included in group exhibitions at the Musée de la Musique in Paris, Centro Per L'arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci in Prato, and Kunsthalle Vienna, among many others. Her work was included in the 2023 major survey exhibition Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the U.K. 1970–1990 at the Tate Britain. Linder's work has been collected by major institutions such as Tate Britain, London; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, Athens; and Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin.
Linder has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, MoMA PS1 in New York, Tate Britain, Kunsthall Oslo, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, among others. Selected group exhibitions include those at the Musée de la Musique in Paris, Centro Per L'arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci in Prato, and Kunsthalle Vienna.
Arianna Mercado | Ocula | 2024
