Penny Slinger – Out of the Shadows hits cinemas this month, and is a long-overdue study of the pioneering artist’s life and career
“I wanted to create art that recreated a state of mind. To be my own muse,” says Penny Slinger in a forthcoming documentary on her career, Penny Slinger – Out of the Shadows, directed by Richard Kovitch. In the film, the artist herself offers her perspective on the seminal, feminist work she created in the 1960s and 70s, while a wealth of her collaborators and admirers – the filmmaker and Slinger’s former partner and collaborator Peter Whitehead features, for example, alongside figures like Jack Bond and Jane and Louise Wilson – explore the radical surrealism that she used in her collages, sculptures and films.
Slinger’s dialogue with the corporeal, eroticism and femininity has remained present in her artworks for decades, and as she moved from London to the Caribbean to California, where she is based today. For Another Man Spring/Summer 2018’s Art Project, for example, Slinger presented an exclusive gallery of new and remixed collages, alongside poems connected to each piece.
Out of the Shadows, which is in cinemas from June 28 – coinciding with an exhibition at Richard Saltoun Gallery, Tantric Transformations, this summer – and will be available to own in the autumn, hones in on a particular period of Slinger’s career. Her 1977 book An Exorcism compiled a series of collages made from photographs taken earlier that decade with Peter Whitehead at Lilford Hall, a derelict stately home in Northamptonshire. The book formed a searing look at the female psyche, born from the “traumatic breakdown” of Slinger and Whitehead’s relationship, and Kovitch’s documentary tells the story of what led Slinger to create the revered and still widely influential body of work. Watch an exclusive clip of Penny Slinger – Out of the Shadows below.
Penny Slinger – Out of the Shadows is in cinemas from June 28, 2019. See Penny Slinger and Richard Kovitch in conversation at the ICA, London, on June 29, 2019.
Penny Slinger: Tantric Transformations is at Richard Saltoun Gallery, London, from June 28 – August 24, 2019.