Lancastrian artist Linder Sterling has been going at it since the mid-1970s, but her work really got in people’s faces a couple of years later with the arrival of punk and her seminal Buzzcocks record cover for Orgasm Addict. Dating one of the founding band members at the time, Linder used a collage combining images from porn and mainstream lifestyle mags in a mash-up that would become something of a signature move – examining the objectification of women.
Over 200 of Linder’s images have been assembled for the retrospective Femme/Objet, usually pitting contrary ideas against each other in a warped way, the very opposite of opposites attracting. Beauty meets distorted ugliness, pornography is partially sanitised by the homely or home-made, the natural and wholesome is made unnatural and grotesque. Manchester-based Linder, who has exhibited at home and abroad over the years, uses many high fashion pictures in her collages, so it’s a perfect fit that the deformed imagery of Femme/Objet is being displayed at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris until 21st April.