2019 Catalogue Archive

For 40 years, Linder has explored social and cultural expectations of gender identity and sexual commodification by rethinking the treatment of the female body. In her Superautomatism works, the artist covers vintage pornographic magazine pages with paint smears inspired by British Surrealist Ithell Colquhoun’s ​Mantic Stain theories – a set of automatic painting techniques written about and practiced by the artist from the 1940s onward. By making paint marks without any premediated control of the material, one gains insight into Linder’s unconscious (according to Colquhoun and other Surrealists) and perhaps a deeper insight into her relationship with the images they cover. Her works also stage an interesting back and forth between the conscious and unconscious in their pairing of a staged, calibrated photo (perhaps meant to appeal to unconscious desires) with an unmediated mark of paint added years later by the artist. Linder’s work has been featured in museum exhibitions at the Royal Festival Hall, London; Kunstverein Munich; ICA, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Kunsthalle Vienna; Tate, St Ives; and the Tate Britain, London. She had a solo exhibition at the Goss Michael Foundation in October 2012.