Linder & Mickalene Thomas at the Hayward Gallery

On a grey February afternoon in London, the Hayward Gallery offers a welcome jolt of colour and shine with two new exhibitions – Mickalene Thomas: All About Love and Linder: Danger Came Smiling. Both shows take on the mainstream depictions of women’s bodies and beauty standards, yet their approaches differ. Thomas, an American artist celebrated for her bedazzled portraits of Black women, brings a high-gloss spectacle to the gallery’s largest space. Linder, the British punk-feminist icon, delivers a career-spanning retrospective steeped in subversive collage. Together, they create a compelling counterpoint – though Linder emerges as the more masterful collagist.

Thomas’s exhibition unfurls like an opulent stage set, a shimmering showcase of large-scale paintings, collages, prints, photographs, videos and installations. Her signature works, portraits of Black women encrusted with rhinestones, dominate the space. These women – her friends, family, lovers and models – fix their gaze on the viewer, commanding attention. “My work is rooted in self-discovery, celebration, joy, sensuality, and a need to see positive images of Black women in the world,” Thomas says. That sentiment radiates from every piece. The sparkles make it almost impossible to look away.

The mixed-media paintings, while technically accomplished, at times verge on the predictable. Their grandeur and nods to the Western canon feel familiar, overly rehearsed. Far more compelling are Thomas’s photographs, like the portrait of her mother. Originally intended as source material for her paintings, these photographs radiate a meditative beauty, and retain an immediacy that sets them apart.

The exhibition reaches for immersive storytelling in I Was Born to Do Great Things, a mixed-media installation reconstructing two living rooms from Thomas’s early life. One from her childhood in late-1970s New Jersey, an homage to her grandmother, and the other from her teenage years. These recreated domestic spaces hum with personal history, evoking a nostalgia that feels at once intimate and universal.

Thomas’s penchant for maximalism can, at times, feel overwhelming. The rhinestones gleam, the canvases shine, at the risk of hindering the deeper emotional currents of her work.

Just steps away, visitors can see Danger Came Smiling, an extensive retrospective chronicling five decades of Linder’s provocative oeuvre, from her formative years in Manchester’s 1970s punk scene to the present day. This exhibition offers an outstanding array of her photomontages, each encapsulating, in her own words, “charm and menace.”

Starting as a graphic design student, Linder abandoned traditional drawing and painting, gravitating instead towards photomontage. She appropriated imagery from women’s magazines, romantic novels and soft-core pornography, reassembling them into montages that disrupt the prevailing male gaze of consumer culture.

Meticulously crafted by hand with a scalpel and glue, Linder’s distinctive visual lexicon draws from diverse art historical traditions, notably Hannah Höch and the Dadaists. Among Linder’s most iconic works is Untitled (1976), often hailed as “the Mona Lisa of punk”. This provocative composition features a glistening nude model with a steam iron for a head and two disembodied, lipsticked grins. Originally created for the Buzzcocks’s 1977 single Orgasm Addict, this image has become emblematic of the era’s punk aesthetic. At the Hayward Gallery, visitors can view the original photomontage, a copy of the record sleeve, and an enlarged version of the image, which serves as a striking visual centrepiece for the show.

Linder’s early feminist photomontages are small in scale and demand careful scrutiny. These intricate compositions combine images of models with household appliances, creating anti-erotic tableaux that are simultaneously unsettling and darkly humorous: in one piece, a woman entwined with her lover stabs at her own eyes with an oversized fork; in another, men’s buttocks blossom into flowers. Each collage is executed with precision, her surreal juxtapositions crackling with tension – irrational desires and unspoken fears lurking just beneath the surface.

To experience both exhibitions side by side is to witness two artists wielding scissors and glue with distinct but equally potent intent. Both women cut, glue and layer, deconstructing and reimagining representations of the body, each in her unique manner. Linder’s work stands out for its subtlety and wit, but Thomas will captivate many with her bold display of gloss and sparkle. Both shows are not to be missed.

Constance Ayrton
Image: Installation view of Mickalene Thomas: All About Love. Mama Bush: (Your Love Keeps Lifting Me), Higher and Higher, (2009)
Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy of the artist and the Hayward Gallery

Linder & Mickalene Thomas are at Hayward Gallery from 11^th February until 5^th May 2025. For further information or to book visit the exhibition’s website here.