Linder Sterling, Migration of Symbols (2014)

260 x 210 mm

Giclee printed onto Somerset 300gdm paper

Colllaged rose printed onto 160gsm gloss paper and mounted onto surface

Edition of 100

Signed and numbered on the back

Biography

One of Linder’s most recognizable works of art first appeared on the sleeve of the 1977 Buzzcocks single “Orgasm Addict.” On the cover, Linder utilized what would become her signature mass-media collage strategy to adorn or violate—or, really, both—a classical nude female torso with mouths at the nipples and a household iron in place of the head. By the time the single was released, Linder Sterling, born in 1954 in Liverpool, had already become a fixture in the Manchester punk and post-punk scene out of which bands like The Fall, Joy Division, the Buzzcocks, Magazine, and The Smiths emerged. In many ways, her collage works from the period have much in common with the subversive practices of punk: Ripping things apart and reassembling them was a way of showing the counterfeit quality and construction of any social image. But Linder’s art went even beyond the rebellion of her underground musical counterparts. Much like Hannah Höch in the Weimar era, Linder fused capitalism, sexuality, violence, feminism, desire, morbidity, and hope in her collages. Those fantastic and yet quotidian works have gained perhaps even more biting currency in today’s culture. Lipsticks, television sets, mouths, household appliances, nude bodies—nothing and everything are sacred in her realm.

Linder has transformed herself many times as an artist since those first collages. She performed as the lead singer in the art-punk band Ludus. She’s applied those assemblage tactics to photography and her own portraiture (most recently in a series with flowers). She’s even combined her radical aesthetic with her love of spectacle in a number of performance pieces, including one that involved black veils, antlers, a gold metallic dress, and a white horse on the beach for the Tate St. Ives’s Dark Monarch exhibition.