Linder: Danger Came Smiling
Mickalene Thomas: All About Love
Hayward Gallery London. Until May 5th 2025
Linder: Danger Came Smiling
As with sampling, collage is given context by its source material, and this is very apparent in Linder’s early work from the late 1970s.
In a way, there’s a whole separate story behind the fourth wall of Linder’s conceptualism, of the magazines, books and newspapers used. When she began cutting and pasting, the old mags and newspapers from the previous five decades were still easily found. So, haircuts, clothes, furniture, architecture etc immediately reflects a bygone era, even compared to when the art was made. As does the paucity of Black people’s faces and bodies.
Brutally simple, the images are visual slogans, punk rock choruses
This retrospective takes us from her early days of cutting the actual magazines up and creating art that corresponded to whatever size this made them, to later years where she seems to have access to high quality printers and can blow up cut-outs to fit any way she likes. So there is also a narrative of changing technology.
There is something charming and human about the early collages. Brutally simple, the images are visual slogans, punk rock choruses. Later, images become pretty, perhaps too sweet, often, to undermine the sexism in some of the source material. 
A well placed, perfectly-sized flower covering a model’s genitals, say, or a wallpaper slice of many, cut-out, rouged lips, as if fifty teenyboppers attacked David Essex’s white limo. Cute is probably not the effect she was after but, nevertheless, that’s the impression.
as if fifty teenyboppers attacked David Essex’s white limo
For readers looking for the Manchester connection there are some brilliant flyers, sleeves and posters for Factory bands that, again, to my eyes, indicate a keen intelligence undermining the most basic of advertising right back there, when she was just starting out, a visible anger that might have got a little lost in more recent years.
Mickalene Thomas: All About Love
In the adjoining gallery, Mickalene Thomas blew my mind, just a little bit.
Previously unknown to me her huge, glittering collages pound your eyeballs. The amount of work involved here, the sheer intellectual quantity plus the actual, obvious physical work involved in festooning her pieces with, probably, literally, miles of sequins, the thought and the depth… breathtaking. Thomas is a one-person war against those who would disregard and demean someone because, first of all, she is a woman, secondly, a woman of colour and, thirdly, a gay woman of colour.
As with Linder, Thomas sometimes uses pornographic-style images, real, recreated or staged, for some of what she makes. But, unlike Linder, there is an unsubtle anger and love, a passion, that is neither arch nor smart in its use.
Mickalene Thomas blew my mind, just a little bit
Two Afro-American versions of the West Indian front room cover, it seems different eras. The seventies version has some tasteful jazz funk of the time playing on a record player, a Donna Summer record propped against a chair. Serving as part of a deep seam, a kind of eulogy of family life running through much of what she creates. Regarding the exhibition, these ensembles are almost too much - there is so much here.
Most fascinating for me are the pieces that hint at the images on mirrors that decorate, or used to decorate, so many working class homes and dodgy discos across the world. But instead of a kitsch tiger or the Taj Mahal, these are faces of Black women that, through some printing trick, morph around, with strips of mirror cutting across them. Captured souls, on their way to a night out.
A perfectly balanced, double exhibition that could, probably, only have happened now. The politics is in the galleries, the cinema, in books. Keep pushing.
Essential information
Linder: Danger Came Smiling
Mickalene Thomas: All About Love (website)
Hayward Gallery London. Until May 5th 2025 (website)
Tue – Fri, 10am – 6pm, Sat, 10am – 8pm, Sun, 10am – 6pm, Closed Mon
