Linder

The Goss-Michael Foundation is pleased to present an exhibition by British artist Linder Sterling, known throughout the art world by her first name, Linder.

Linder’s show at The Goss-Michael Foundation will consist of a large group of her characteristic collages and new large-scale photographs displayed in light-boxes, each of which are part of the private collection of George Michael and Kenny Goss. Working in all mediums from music, to collage to performance and film to theatre and two dimensional art, Linder became known in 1976 as one of the main players in the Manchester punk scene.

In the late 1970’s Linder started using collage to juxtapose porn images with images of house appliances, or other desired objects, sharing the subversive practices of the punk movement. By mixing up fractured signals and messages out of context, Linder exposed the way social images are constructed. Her Buzzcocks ‘Orgasm Addict’ single sleeve which depicts a nude female body with mouths at the nipples and a household iron in place of the head is now considered an iconic symbol of the punk movement.

Since the 1970’s, Linder has consistently and uncompromisingly embraced radical feminist perspectives and explored the media treatment of the female body in particular. In the collages, photomontages and performances Linder has made since this time, she sets about recasting and colliding the ideals of commercially and culturally rendered expectations of gender-specificity and identity.

A major part of the show at the Goss-Michael Foundation consists of large-scale light-boxes with new montages, originally hand-spliced as before and then re-photographed. The use of the light-box gives these works the lush and tantalizing characteristics of advertising light-boxes, the emblems of our consumerist world that came to dominate the media and the landscape of the western world in recent years. Linder takes over this powerful tool of mass media and turns it to itself to expose socially and culturally reinforced norms and expectations of gender identity, sexual commodification and representations of desire.