Linder treats herself to a retrospective cut for Blackpool

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IN IMAGES

Photographer and pioneer of British punk photomontage, Linder Sterling unfolds this summer at Blackpool’s Grundy Art Gallery a retrospective recomposed to the measure of the place.

By Guénola Pellen. Images by Linder Sterling.

Born in Liverpool in 1954, Linder Sterling came of age amid the punk ferment of 1970s Manchester. Heir to Hannah Höch’s photomontages and Claude Cahun’s cross-dressed self-portraits, she takes a scalpel to photographs lifted from women’s and pornographic magazines, recomposing them into hybrid bodies.

Her sleeve for “Orgasm Addict”, the Buzzcocks single released in 1977, remains an icon of British punk, as does the raw meat dress she wore on stage in 1982, nearly three decades before Lady Gaga.

In Blackpool, the exhibition refuses to be a carbon copy of its London incarnation. The Grundy Art Gallery, an Edwardian jewel-box set in a seaside resort of flamboyant kitsch, cultivates precisely that friction between high art and popular culture.

Slipped among the works are little-known drawings by L.S. Lowry, antique botanical models, paintings from the museum’s own collection and monumental billboards by BuildHollywood. And the founding motif resurfaces: Principle of Totality (Version I), a 2012 photomontage that has become the retrospective’s official image, reprises line for line the iron-headed body of 1977.

The year 2026 crowns half a century of practice: since 1976, Linder has wielded the Swann-Morton surgical scalpel that became the emblem of her gesture. The date also seals the British journey of the exhibition inaugurated at London’s Hayward Gallery in 2025, of which Blackpool is the final port of call.

The coastal town in England’s North West is no stranger to the artist’s universe: her films screened in the exhibition capture, among others, “Blackpool’s cowboys, Manchester jack the lads, and Linder’s own bodybuilding”.

Beneath its illuminations and fairground rides, the resort also harbours an unsuspected post-punk memory: in 1979, a local band brought Joy Division and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark to the Imperial Hotel, before joining Factory, the very label of the Manchester scene where Linder cut her teeth. Her blade, for its part, has lost none of its edge.

“Linder: The Return of Linderland” runs at the Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool (England), from 18 July to 3 October 2026.

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