Opening The Year With An Orgasm

Linder: Danger Came Smiling and Mickalene Thomas: All About Love are both at the Hayward Gallery from 11 February to 5 May. Ed Vaizey takes a look.

What’s On At The Hayward Gallery?

The Hayward Gallery opened in July 1968, just a month after I was born. This is of no interest to anyone except me – suffice to say, it has been around a long time, though it struggles to find its place in the world. It is part of the Southbank Centre, and fits neatly into the Brutalist landscape that is the National Theatre and the performance space of the South Bank. But it is tucked away, sits in the shadow of Tate Modern and competes with the Serpentine.

So it may need something special to make you go, and in this respect the Hayward has come up with the goods for the start of 2025 – a dual retrospective of two outstanding women artists, the Liverpudlian Linder Sterling and Brooklyn-based Mickalene Thomas.

It may be a pun too far to say that Linder’s show is orgasmic, but this punk artist first emerged in the ’70s with her iconic album covers. Her collage for the Buzzcocks’ album Orgasm Addict makes 1977 famous not just for the Queen’s Silver Jubilee.

You will recognise many of the images instantly, particularly if you are as old as me and the Hayward. Linder’s work blends magazine images with soft pornographic cut outs to provoke musings on feminism, protest and cultural critique. Orgasm Addict’s naked woman with an iron superimposed on her face is iconic for that reason – it exposes both male and female stereotypes: pornography for men, fashion and domesticity for women.

Mama Bush: (Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher, by Mickalene Thomas (2009)

Mickalene Thomas: All About Love is part of an international tour of this pioneering mixed-media artist’s work, and her first solo show in the UK. Her portraits of black women (Michele Obama, commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery in Washington; Oprah Winfrey; Condoleezza Rice) combine painting and collage using rhinestones and enamel, seen against psychedelic backgrounds of primary colours. The figures leap out and challenge you with their confidence and power. Like Linder, Thomas’s work has adorned album covers, collaborating with Solange on her EP True, and also fashion runways, as seen at Dior in 2023.

The title of the show is a nod to bell hooks, the black author (who chooses to keep her name lowercase) whose writing explores notions of romantic love and the need for female empowerment. Thomas is telling you from the get-go what her paintings are about. She is also an art historian, and many of her paintings pay homage to the great French artists of the late 19th century, such as Degas.

Both Thomas and Linder have been closely involved in their shows, particularly Linder, who cherishes what she and the Hayward have in common – both venerable and established yet still, all these years later, containing the power to shock and provoke. These twin exhibitions will pull you out of your post-Christmas stupor, and ask you to debate and think. Perhaps in a Trump world, that is more important than ever.

Tickets

Linder: Danger Came Smiling and Mickalene Thomas: All About Love are both at the Hayward Gallery from 11 February to 5 May. Tickets are £18pp, or members visit for free. Book at southbankcentre.co.uk