Linder is renowned for her photography, photomontage, and confrontational performance art which boldly deconstruct gender stereotypes, libidinous desires, and transgressive acts. An active figure in the punk and post-punk scenes of 1970s and 80s Manchester, where she formed the band Ludus in 1978, she gained early recognition with her photomontage for the Buzzcocks single Orgasm Addict which combined material sourced from an Argos catalogue and a French erotic magazine. Her work has continued to sharpen its focus on striking, playful, and political juxtapositions through imagery taken from a wide range of printed matter including pornographic magazines, dance journals, as well as cookery and horticulture books. In these composite images, faces are hidden behind blooming roses and household appliances, penetrative acts are concealed by montaged objects, and nude figures emerge from behind kitchenware. In this sense, her works play with unconscious associations between normative beauty and aspirational living; products and bodies are brought together, resulting in a tension between revulsion and seduction. At other times, Linder uses her own body like a piece of paper: a site that can be incised to radical ends. She takes cues from the Berlin Dada artists of Weimar Germany, notably collagists Hannah Höch and John Heartfield, as well as Surrealists such as Ithell Colquhoun. A major figure in feminist art both in the UK and internally, for several decades Linder’s work has interrogated the commodification of consumer and sexual appetites and the perverse undercurrents of inherited norms and societal roles.

Linder was born in Liverpool in 1954 and lives and works in London. In 2025 she will have a major retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, London. 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 la Ville de Paris, later travelling to the Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover. Linder has presented recent solo exhibitions at 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 Arts Council Collection, London; the DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, Athens; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; MoMA, New York; and Tate, London.