Penelope Slinger (born 1947 in London) is best known for the provocative and surreal photographic collages that she made in the late 1960s and 1970s.
She wrote her student thesis on the collage books of Max Ernst, whose influence can be seen in the photographic collages reproduced in ‘50% - The Visible Woman’. As she writes: ‘Having discovered the magic of surrealism, I wanted to employ its tools and methods to create a language for the feminine psyche to express itself’.
We have two copies of this book: this one appears to be a dummy edition bound with cobra skin, signed by the artist in 1969, when she was just 21.
In the same year she exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) as part of their ‘Young and Fantastic’ exhibition, through which she first met artist, patron and co-founder of the ICA Roland Penrose. This book comes from Roland Penrose’s library and archive, which the National Galleries of Scotland acquired in 1995.
