Linder

Danger Came Smiling

★★★★☆

On until 5 May 2025

It’s been a long time since Linder was sexy. That’s not because her incisive bust-ups of bodies and ideas are any less compelling than the still circulating visions of, say, Barbara Kruger, but because Linder’s second-wave feminist propositions were ruthlessly superseded by another set of objects.

Take the iconic 1976 photomontage of a nude woman with an iron for a head which Linder made for a Buzzcocks album cover. This modest yet outrageous image, now in the Tate collection, serves as the exhibition’s key marketing asset. That the artist remade it in 2015 as a larger-than-life lightbox says as much about her fight as the fact that this new work remains available for purchase.

Linder just about survived the demise of the print pictorial magazine. Her costume and sculptural works from the last decade are intriguing but understandably limited in number at the very end of the stuffily hung show that gets only a small part of the Hayward’s otherwise cavernous spaces. They make the diminishing returns of Linder’s and her peer’s demands poignantly evident. 


notes and notices are short and curt exhibition reviews. Read more:

Divine Southgate-Smith, Navigator at Nicoletti ★☆☆☆☆

Divine Southgate-Smith

Navigator

★☆☆☆☆

It is too late to save the regime, yet too early to mourn it.

Future Relics at Union Pacific ★★★★☆

Future Relics

★★★★☆

“Reskilling” has the same ring in art as “reindustrialisation” does in geopolitics.

Sula Bermúdez-Silverman, Bad Luck Rock at Josh Lilley ★★☆☆☆

Sula Bermúdez-Silverman

Bad Luck Rock

★★☆☆☆

This is a poor man’s version of history or a philistine collector’s absolution.

TJ Wilcox, Hiding in Plain Sight at Sadie Coles HQ ★★☆☆☆

TJ Wilcox

Hiding in Plain Sight

★★☆☆☆

Vanity proceeds in circles.

Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting at National Portrait Gallery ★★★☆☆

Jenny Saville

The Anatomy of Painting

★★★☆☆

There is no trace of the visceral in Saville’s gentle pencil studies, for example.

Nikita Gale, Blur Ballad at Emalin ★★☆☆☆

Nikita Gale

Blur Ballad

★★☆☆☆

Even though the show brings together a few unusual tricks, they are disjointed and leave little for the eye to linger on.

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