Stuart Shave/Modern Art is pleased to present the first major solo show of British artist Linder, showing new work alongside the artist’s iconic work from the Seventies onwards.

Over the last thirty years, Linder has explored the potential of collage in direct relation to her audit and analysis of sexuality and its mass mediation.

At times aggressively confrontational, her work establishes a powerful tension between portent and inscrutability. In Linder’s earliest photomontages - one of which was used by Buzzcocks as the cover image for their now emblematic punk release, ‘Orgasm Addict’, in 1977 - her figures are encoded with a dark, ceremonial symbolism, shot through political signage and keen edged wit. In her selection of pornographic images, most dating from the early 1960s to the middle years of the 1970s, Linder encodes the laborious sexual postures - as enacted for the lenses of unknown photographers - with a relief of psychological symbolism, recasting the models as mutants of Mass Age consumerism, through whom the seductive pose of tableaux vivants is recreated as scenes from a feminist allegory of commodification.

Linder’s influences include the work of Richard Hamilton, Aubrey Bearsdsley, John Heartfield and Hannanh Hoch, as well as illustrators Ronald Searle and Rene Grau. Linder’s more recent works create characters and scenes which appear drawn from a strange alliance between British Neo Romanticism and Pop. The recent larger scale works describe sparse seemingly impoverished or transient interiors as the sites of sexual encounters and displays which are as vulnerable in their human frailty as they are subordinate to the tiredness of a pornographer’s assembly line. In this way Linder continues to explore the terrain of the sexualised image with the clean incision and often abrupt punctuation made possible by photomontage. Their enlargement from the small clandestine encounter of the seedy voyeur to the large and unabashed display in the very public sphere of the billboard, highlights Linder’s latest works as rigorously pertinent in a foreground where the human figure is still commodified and lustily exploited.

Linder, born Liverpool, UK, 1954 has had two solo shows in 2007 at PS1 New York and Baltic, Gateshead along with a performance at Le Magasin, Grenoble. The artists work was also included in both Panic Attack! Art in the Punk Years, Barbican, London and The Secret Public: The last days of the British Underground 1978 - 1988, ICA, London.

Linder will be in conversation with Lisa le Feuvre, supported by Tate Etc magazine as part of Late @ Tate series on the 7th December at Tate Britain, London.