PENNY SLINGER
Lives and works in California, USA
Penny Slinger is a British-born artist based in California who employs themes such as feminism, eroticism and mysticism in her work through a variety of mediums including photography, collage, drawing, sculpture, and video. Her work lays between feminist surrealism and punk and has been continuously deconstructing patriarchal norms while embodying women’s sexuality and archetypal mythology. Her work anticipated many dominating trends of today’s society.
Slinger graduated from the Chelsea College of Art in the late 1960s. Exhibiting widely in the UK in the 1960s and 1970s, she translated femininity and female desire into ground-breaking works across performance, photography and video. She moved to the Caribbean in 1980 where she engaged with the local indigenous community and produced a body of work dedicated to this research. She then moved to Northern California and worked on the archetypal forms of the Divine Feminine in forms of digital collages.
2009 marked a renewed interest in Penny’s early work after her inclusion in the Angels of Anarchy exhibition at Manchester Art Museum and in The Dark Monarch – Magic & Modernity in British Art at Tate St. Ives in 2009. Penny Slinger-Out of the Shadows, 2017, is a documentary by Richard Kovitch focusing on Penny’s life and work in the 1960s and 1970s, revealing the pioneering nature of her work. From 2018 Penny has resided in Los Angeles where she has been working on a series of large format prints of digital collages utilizing her own body as a body of experience.
Her work was shown in the institutions worldwide including recent shows in Camden Arts Centre, London, UK (2020); British Museum, London, UK (2020); Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, Scotland (2019); Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery, Norwich, UK (2018); Tate St Ives, Cornwall, UK (2018); Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, UK (2018); The Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, Poland (2017); Monnaie de Paris, Paris, France; National Museum in the Arts, Washington D.C. (2017); Hayward Gallery, London, UK (2015); Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany (2015); Trondheim Kunstmuseum, Trondheim, Norway (2013); Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester, UK (2009); and more.