Hayward Gallery is pleased to invite Frieze 91 members to a private morning tour of its upcoming exhibitions, Linder: Danger Came Smiling and Mickalene Thomas: All About Love.
The tour will be led by Hayward Gallery Assistant Curators Katie Guggenheim and Thomas Sutton.
Linder: Danger Came Smiling
Photo: birrer
Linder’s first London retrospective showcases 50 years of the pioneering feminist artist’s work, dissecting our fascination with the body and its representation.
From the early photomontages made while she was part of the punk scene of 1970s Manchester, to new work in digital montage shown for the first time, the exhibition presents the breadth of Linder’s artistic output across montage, photography, performance and sculpture.
The body and its photographic representation, from early glamour photography to digital deep fakes, is central to Linder’s approach to image-making.
Often working with a medical grade scalpel, she draws on the creative and violent power of the cut in her forensic examination of our shifting attitudes to aspirational lifestyles, sex, food and fashion.
Mickalene Thomas: All About Love
All About Love presents two decades of work by the internationally celebrated artist and pioneering portraitist Mickalene Thomas (born 1971, USA).
Thomas is renowned for her large-scale paintings of Black women radically luxuriating and in repose, adorned with vivid patterns and ravishing, brilliant rhinestones, as well as her innovative use of collage techniques.
Thomas’ depictions of women from her circle of friends, family, lovers and models are loving, celebratory and glamorous, with her alluring and self-assured muses exuding comfort and pleasure.
References to the history of European painting abound in Thomas’ work (including to Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet and Pablo Picasso). Her subjects confidently claim space within this male-dominated art history from which Black and LGBTQIA+ people have largely been excluded.
Featuring paintings, photographs, collages and installations, All About Love transforms the Hayward Gallery with bespoke wallpapers, textiles and furnishings nostalgically evoking the artist’s 1970s childhood.
Thomas’ art is steeped in contemporary feminist literature, and the exhibition title pays loving homage to the late American author and activist bell hooks.