Across five decades, interdisciplinary artist Linder (aka Linder Sterling, b.1954) has explored the politics of gender and media representation through an experimental practice embracing subversive humour and social commentary. In her current retrospective 'Linder: Danger Came Smiling' at the Hayward Gallery – which you can learn more about on Bloomberg Connects – the artist earns her place as a central figure within the history of twentieth- and twenty-first-century photomontage.
Using a medical scalpel, Linder culls from fashion, lifestyle, and pornographic magazines, producing compositions rife with unexpected juxtapositions. The Hayward exhibition begins with Linder's work in Manchester's punk scene and continues through her contemporary takes on digital manipulation, showcasing the artist's transformative interventions into image culture.
Commenting on her practice, Linder notes her work 'has been described as carrying both charm and menace', refusing to fit neatly into interpretive categories. Curator Rachel Thomas reflects on the multilayered nature of Linder's work in the introduction to a detailed audio guide produced for Bloomberg Connects. Moving through the galleries, the guide picks out some of the exhibition's key highlights, situating individual artworks within the context of Linder's long career and her various influences.
One of Linder's earliest and most famous photomontages was made in 1977, when she created the album art for punk rock band Buzzcocks's first single 'Orgasm Addict'. At this time, she was involved in Manchester's punk and post-punk scene, creating art while rubbing shoulders with Morrissey and the Sex Pistols and fronting her own band, Ludus.
This work – a more recent version titled It's The Buzz, Cock! appears in the Hayward show, which you can find out more about here – featured a pornographic photograph of a nude woman's shiny oiled torso, her arms raised. The woman's head was replaced with a clothing iron and two toothy grins appear in place of nipples, with lipstick and pearly teeth at once sensual and threatening.
Linder was inspired to begin working with collage after reading art historian Dawn Adès's 1976 book Photomontage, which features early twentieth-century work by Dadaists including Hannah Höch, John Heartfield, and Raoul Hausmann. Artists involved in the Berlin Dada movement adopted practices of collage and assemblage, piecing together found images and objects to produce startling combinations that commented on modern life in the aftermath of the First World War.
Many expressed a particular interest in the photographic image, and cut and pasted pictures from magazines, newspapers, and print advertisements. The sole female artist officially recognised as a member of the Berlin Dada group, Höch used her practice to confront shifting gender roles and their portrayal in the mass print media.
During the decades following the Second World War, when Linder was a child and young adult, consumer culture and the mass media remained a major focus for artists involved in the burgeoning Pop art movement, which appropriated images drawn from advertising.
Painters such as Pauline Boty and Peter Blake incorporated a dizzying array of references drawn from popular culture, comics, and advertisements in collages and collage-like compositions.
Many artists continued to experiment with photomontage, with Richard Hamilton emerging as a key proponent of the medium in the 1960s. Often depicting domestic interiors with women posing next to state-of-the-art appliances and modern furniture, Hamilton's photomontages speak to the performativity of gender and objectification – subjects Linder would later address in her own work.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Linder's work was in dialogue with a wider feminist art movement arising across different parts of the world. Many of the artists who engaged with feminist issues, such as American artists Martha Rosler and Mary Beth Edelson, employed practices of collage to highlight social inequalities.
In the UK, Margaret Harrison collaborated with the National Campaign for Homeworkers in London to advocate for women performing underpaid piecework in their homes, without benefits or labour protections. Her 1977 canvas-based work Homeworkers combines magazine spreads, paint, found objects, and written testimony to raise awareness of homeworkers' struggle for recognition, while Rape from 1978 highlighted women as victims of sexual violence.
A decade later, artist Sonia Boyce produced her mixed-media collage From Tarzan to Rambo..., which juxtaposed photographs of the young artist alongside racist caricatures of Black people from films and cartoons.
Grappling with the lasting effect of stereotypical representations on identity formation, this work underlines the need for intersectional approaches to feminism that account for differences of race, class, sexuality, ability, and other social identities.
Linder's work from the 1970s and 1980s likewise radically transforms images gleaned from the popular media. For her 1976–1977 series Pretty Girls, the artist replaced the faces of glamour and nude models with household appliances and kitchen tools, creating woman-object hybrids that the artist considers cyborgian. Find out more about this work on the Bloomberg Connects guide.
The Bloomberg Connects app at Hayward Gallery, London
With a biting sense of humour, these works lampoon sexist attitudes that situate women as submissive and naturally domestic.
In an untitled work made slightly earlier, a young couple's tender embrace is disrupted by a larger-than-life fork, which the woman jabs into her wide-open eyes. Here and elsewhere in her oeuvre, Linder's figures seem to reject the trappings of family life and traditional heterosexual romance.
With mismatched features and body parts patchworked together in grotesque configurations, Linder's photomontages critique the excesses of capitalism and women's idealisation as model consumers.
Installation view, 'Linder: Danger Came Smiling', Hayward Gallery, London, 2025
While Linder is well-read in feminist theory, she has described her artistic methodology as 'forensic' and attempts to 'suspend judgement' while working with images loaded with cultural baggage. In her more recent work, she has addressed new imaging technologies such as AI, producing works she calls 'deepfakes', which feature photographs of her younger self atop vintage Playboy centrefolds.
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Taken collectively, her body of work refuses easy categorisation, preferring instead to probe the slippery boundaries between disgust and desire, criticism and enjoyment, and shock and titillation.
Though in recent decades image culture has expanded of the printed page and into digital platforms like social media, photomontage and collage-based artistic practices remain a key interest of contemporary artists. Like Linder, multidisciplinary artist Monster Chetwynd has incorporated photographs of herself in photocollages that wittily reflect on gendered representational practices and performativity.
Njideka Akunyili Crosby layers photographic transfers, drawings, and hand-painted imagery in works like Cassava Garden, which combines figures with botanical motifs and colourful decorative patterns.
These artists, among others, join Linder in treating the production and dissemination of images as essential meaning-making processes, worth carefully examining.
Installation view, 'Linder: Danger Came Smiling', Hayward Gallery, London, 2025
Now aged 71, Linder remains a keen interpreter and radical subverter of contemporary image culture, incisive with her scalpel in hand. As art historian Marina Warner writes in the exhibition's catalogue: 'Linder's blade seeks out, probes and delineates that hope for another future.'
Lexington Davis, curator and art historian currently completing an AHRC-funded PhD at the University of St Andrews
'Linder: Danger Came Smiling' is at the Hayward Gallery until 5th May 2025
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This content was funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies
