Eve Ackroyd & Penny Slinger : Looking at Her

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Eve Ackroyd & Penny Slinger : Looking at Her

Preview: Friday 14 November, 6 – 8pm

Event: Thursday 20 November : Q&A with Eve Ackroyd & Sascha Behrendt. RSVP info@bosseandbaum.com

Exhibition : 15 – 22 November 2025

Bosse & Baum is pleased to present Looking at Her, a two-person exhibition by artists Eve Ackroyd and Penny Slinger, bringing together new and historical works that examine the female image, authorship, and agency across two generations of women artists, both of whom began their practices at Chelsea College of Art, thirty years apart. The exhibition features new works by both artists, alongside historical prints from Slinger’s archive, marking the first time these works are shown together.

Penny Slinger is a pioneering feminist artist known for her explorations of the body, sexuality, and surrealism. For this exhibition she returns to her own student work at Chelsea, particularly her Mirror Series from the 1960s and early films such as the 1969 Exhibit and Stairs, Tunnels and Mirrors. These foundational works marked the beginning of her use of her own body as subject, placing herself in fractured, mirrored compositions that defied objectification and reclaimed authorship. She challenged objectification, her work interrogated the role of the muse and subverted art historical traditions that treated women as passive symbols of beauty or desire.

For this exhibition, Slinger has created a new body of mirror-based photographic prints and drawings made in collaboration with her niece Milly. Using the same analogue techniques she developed in 1968–69, Slinger re-engages with the mirrored matrix that defined her early series. In her own words, these works offer “a novel interpretation of reality,” evoking Cubist multiplicity and the sensual fragmentation reminiscent of Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase. Like Ackroyd, Slinger turns to family as both subject and symbol, evoking a layered, intergenerational dialogue about representation, intimacy, and power.

Eve Ackroyd (b. 1984) seeks out stories of female friendship and motherhood, celebrating sublime and intimate moments of quotidian life. She treats the figure—whether human or otherwise—as a vessel through which to explore candour and humour, secrets and surprise. Ackroyd’s paintings convey sensuality and stillness, exploring an interplay between the elusive gazes of viewer and subject. Her rich colour palette and sinuous forms transfigure memories of familial and platonic connection into an ethereal world of mutual recognition and wordless conviviality.

Eve Ackroyd studied painting at Chelsea College of Art & Weissensee School of Art in Berlin. Recent shows include Pictures of You, Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, Ordinary Things, Workplace, London, Upon a Tide, Workplace, London, Second Body, Turn Gallery, New York, Fifth Floor Apartment, Turn Gallery, New York; La Banda, TV Projects, New York; Within Without, Project Art Space, New York; Interior Landscapes, Assembly Room, New York; Living and Real, Kapp Kapp, Philadelphia; Sweet Cheeks, Big Pictures, LA and Subject III, Cob Gallery, London. Her work has been written about for FT, Times, Brooklyn Rail, I-D, AnOther, Dazed & Confused, Artsy and Hyperallergic.

The exhibition originated from Eve Ackroyd’s reflection on her formative years at Chelsea, twenty years ago. She first began her ongoing investigation into making images of women through a woman’s lens, in the early 2000s, drawing on mass culture, commercialised pop feminism, the burgeoning influence of the porn industry on fashion photography, “lads mags” and reality TV. Ackroyd began to shape a visual language rooted in gender politics, identity, eroticism, and the inherited codes of art history. For this exhibition, she presents new paintings and collages based on images of her aunt. Her image as a complex, intimate figure filtered through desire, memory, and critique, embodies the tensions that have shaped Ackroyd’s practice: the erotic and the familial, the constructed and the real, the muse and the self.

The parallels between the two artists are striking: both returning to their origins at Chelsea, using the figure of a female family member as muse, and working through the lens of feminism to construct images that resist simple categorisation. Ackroyd and Slinger share a commitment to examining the female body not as an object of spectacle, but as a site of complexity, both lived and imagined. This exhibition offers a powerful meditation on legacy, artistic inheritance, and the deeply personal, political, and poetic act of seeing in mirroring and multiplying one another. It is a meditation on what it means to see, and be seen, as a woman, as an artist, and as a subject of one’s own image.

The practice of London-born, LA-based artist Penny Slinger (b. 1947) spans photography, collage, film and sculpture. Active from the late 1960s, Slinger emerged into a maelstrom of political protest, social change and sexual freedom. She graduated from the Chelsea School of Art in 1969 having developed a visual language she described as ‘feminist surrealism’, influenced by her study of European Surrealism, her friendship with Roland Penrose and her association with Max Ernst. Slinger quickly began exploring and investigating the notion of the feminine subconscious and psyche, using her own body to examine the relationship between sexuality, mysticism and femininity.

The work of Penny Slinger has been featured in numerous exhibitions, including most recently ‘Women in Revolt!’ at Tate Britain, London, UK (2023/24), ‘Bloom’ at York Art Gallery, York, UK (2023), ‘The Horrow Show’ at Somerset House, London, UK (2022), ‘Body Poetics’ at GIANT, Bournemouth, UK (2022), ‘Joan Didion: What She Means’ at the Hammer Museum, New York, USA (2023), ‘Penny Slinger: 50% Unboxed’ at Pace Gallery, New York, USA (2022), ‘House of the Sleeping Beauties’ at Sotheby’s S|2 Gallery, London, UK (2019); ‘Visible Women’, Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery, UK (2018); ‘Virginia Woolf: An Exhibition Inspired by Her Writings’, Tate St. Ives, Cornwall, UK (2018); the major touring exhibition ‘Feminist Avant-Garde of the 1970s: Works from the Verbund Collection’ at the Photographers’ Gallery, London, UK (2016–2017) and Hamburger Kunsthalle, Germany (2015); ‘History Is Now: 7 Artists Take on Britain’, Hayward Gallery, London, UK (2015); ‘Angels of Anarchy: Women Artists and Surrealism’, Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester, UK (2009); and ‘The Dark Monarch: Magic and Modernity in British Art’, Tate St. Ives, UK (2009).

Exhibition Text by Philippa Snow

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Interview with Eve Ackroyd, Penny Slinger by Sascha Behrendt

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