LONDON.- Modern Art opened Where the tongue slips it speaks truth, Linder's fourth exhibition with the gallery. This exhibition follows closely on from Danger Came Smiling her celebrated retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, London, which is currently on tour at Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea. Linder is widely known for her work across photography, performance, textiles, video and sculpture. For this exhibition Linder focuses on photomontage, the medium she is most internationally known for. 2026 marks fifty years since Linder first used a Swann-Morton medical grade scalpel to cut out magazine images to skewer our accepted and prevailing understanding of representation and gender politics. As throughout her career, the photomontages in this exhibition probe the subjects of commodification, sexualisation and cultural value.

The exhibition is built around Greek mythology and the mythologisation of everyday figures. In a new body of work, porcelain figurines are overlaid on top of images of French New Wave actor Brigitte Bardot. The inanimate objects hold Bardot in a game of equivalence, where Bardot becomes frozen in time, alongside these shiny ornaments. In a separate series of photomontages based on Book X of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Linder reflects on Myrrha’s change from woman to tree as a means to escape the advances of her incestuous father Cinyras. Here, Linder combines appropriated pornographic photographs with images from catalogues of Roman sculpture, to stage a stark encounter between sex and power. Recently Linder has started working with professional footballer Miguel Azeez, as both subject and collaborator - here the artist and athlete meet in the zone where music, art and sport overlaps.

In another group of works images of Ancient Greek statues and busts are juxtaposed with 20th century domestic objects, bringing the mythological into the everyday, a recurring trope throughout her career. In other examples Linder obfuscates the faces of classical statues with enamel paint, their familiar gazes awakened from centuries of fixity. With a process of automatism, inspired by the work of artist Ithell Colquhoun, Linder utilises what she refers to as ‘mantic stain-making’ to access what’s hidden underneath the surface of the somatic body. Where the tongue slips it speaks truth continues Linder’s longstanding examination of how we process the visual world. The intuitive and reconstructive processes involved in the making of these works expand our perception of the present through the past.

Linder was born in Liverpool in 1954 and lives and works in London. In February 2025, she opened a major retrospective Danger Came Smiling at the Hayward Gallery, London which toured to Inverleith House, Edinburgh; Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea and will soon tour to Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool until September 2026. The touring show Linderism was mounted in 2020 at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, later travelling to the Hatton Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne. The solo exhibition Femme/Objet, was organised in 2013 by the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, later travelling to the Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover. Linder has presented recent solo exhibitions at Charleston, Firle (2022); Modern Art, London (2019); Glasgow Women’s Library (2018); Nottingham Contemporary (2018); Chatsworth House, Derbyshire (2018); The Hepworth Wakefield (2013); and Tate St Ives (2013). She has participated in recent two-person and group exhibitions at dépendance, Brussels (2022); Tate Liverpool (2021); the Royal Academy, London (2020); Camden Art Centre, London (2020); the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (2019); and Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2019). In 2017, she was awarded the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award. Linder’s works are held in collections including the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Arts Council Collection, London; the DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, Athens; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Tate, London.