Friday 21 November 2025 - Sunday 1 March 2026
10:00 am - 4:30 pm
Glynn Vivian at Night, Thursday 20 November, 17:30 – 20:00.
Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea, presents Hayward Gallery Touring exhibition Linder: Danger Came Smiling, offering an illuminating overview of this iconic artist’s 50 year-long career.
A selection of Linder’s trailblazing photomontages explore the full range of her artistic practice, underscoring the experimental and feminist impulses of her thought-provoking work.
Adapted from the London retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, this touring iteration presents the full trajectory of Linder’s artistic production, from the early work that grew from her involvement in the punk scene of 1970s Manchester to new works that have never been shown before. Linder’s distinct visual language is characterised by a playful irreverence and examine our shifting attitudes to aspirational lifestyles, sex, food and fashion.
Linder first achieved prominence in the 1970s, within the dynamic landscape of punk and post-punk music, gaining widespread recognition with her band, Ludus, and for her groundbreaking album covers. Her photomontage for the cover of Buzzcocks’ 1977 single ‘Orgasm Addict’ endures as one of the emblematic images of the British punk scene. Five decades later, Linder is an internationally recognised artist renowned for her multifaceted practice.
Linder’s journey has been one of relentless exploration, venturing into realms as varied as fashion, music, performance, perfume, textiles, and film. Beyond the raw and abrasive energy of the DIY punk aesthetic, her artistic vision is informed by a rich tapestry of influences spanning religious art, surrealism, mysticism, pornography and the shifting landscape of social media. The artist’s work is animated by her biting and sometimes outrageous sense of humour.
Linder has used photomontage throughout her career. Working with a medical grade scalpel she draws on the violent and creative power of cutting to dissect, reshape and comically deflate the commercial representation of gender norms and sexual identities. Often drawing on images of the body, Linder exposes the weighty stereotypes imposed on both ends of the gender spectrum and their evolution over time. In her striking series of photographs, such as SheShe (1981), Linder is pictured taking on various satirical feminine personae to navigate concepts of personal invention and the performative dimensions of identity.
Invoking the original essence of glamour— a powerful fusion of enchantment and magic – Linder’s work delivers a humorous and cutting feminist critique. At the heart of her artistic practice lies a profound engagement with the poetics of protest, in which artistic inquiry intertwines seamlessly with radical thinking.
Linder says: “The cuts made by my blades and scissors are perpetually liberating. Each restores agency across print and page. The found images in my work are often quite fragile both materially and conceptually, it doesn’t take much then to hijack them and to take them somewhere far more surreal.”
Linder: Danger Came Smiling is curated by Hayward Gallery Touring.
About Linder
Linder was born in Liverpool in 1954, and lives and works in London. A retrospective of her work, Femme/Objet, was organised in 2013 by the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, later travelling to the Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover. Her first institutional survey in the UK, Linderism, was mounted in 2020 at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, later travelling to the Hatton Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne. Linder has presented recent solo exhibitions at Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Paris (2023); Blum, Los Angeles (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 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.
About Hayward Gallery Touring
Hayward Gallery Touring is the UK’s largest contemporary art organisation producing touring exhibitions. Based at Southbank Centre, Hayward Gallery Touring works with a range of artists, curators, designers and writers to develop curatorial projects and ambitious exhibitions that are often beyond the scope of a single institution.
Hayward Gallery Touring’s programme includes the British Art Show – the largest and most significant exhibition of contemporary art produced in the UK – as well as thematic group shows and monographic exhibitions created for venues including museums, galleries, art centres, libraries, schools, hospitals and other unexpected partners and places.
Hayward Gallery Touring exhibitions are seen by up to half a million people in over 45 cities and towns each year.
About the Southbank Centre
The Southbank Centre is the UK’s largest multi-arts centre and engages the most diverse audiences of any performing arts organisation in the UK. Our biggest venue, the Royal Festival Hall (2,700 seats) is the lasting legacy of the 1951 Festival of Britain and the ambition and values of that project – that arts, ideas, innovation and culture can heal communities and should be available and accessible to everyone – are still our guiding principles today. The Southbank Centre is uniquely able to offer a wide-ranging, inclusive and world-class artistic programme spanning contemporary visual arts, music, dance, performance, literature, comedy and spoken word across the Royal Festival Hall, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Purcell Room, the Hayward Gallery and our free spaces. We are also home to the National Poetry Library, the National Academy for Social Prescribing (NASP) and six resident orchestras (Aurora Orchestra, Chineke! Orchestra, London Philharmonic Orchestra, London Sinfonietta, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and Philharmonia Orchestra). www.southbankcentre.co.uk
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