Blum & Poe is pleased to announce an exhibition of Penny Slinger—her second solo show with the gallery and her first solo presentation in Tokyo. Since the 1970s, the British-born artist has explored the connection between eroticism, mysticism, feminism, and art through her work.

Deeply influenced by the world of dreams and myths, Slinger employs a broad lexicon of symbols to examine how a woman is seen and how she sees herself—woman as goddess, woman as object of desire, woman as mother. Her practice has evolved from the surrealistic penchant to reveal the workings of the subconscious to an exploration of the “Tantric perspective” and its embrace of the superconscious.

The exhibition will focus on two key series. Originally conceived as a book that was published in 1977, An Exorcism depicts haunting scenes of male and female figures, including the artist, inhabiting a derelict Gothic mansion in rural England. For Slinger, the mansion is symbolic of “the power of patriarchal establishment,” and the uncanny mis-en-scènes that she portrays there represent a form of self-psychoanalysis—an “unraveling of the Self from dualistic limitations and the projections of others.” In Mountain Ecstasy (1978), Slinger merges ancient Egyptian, sexual, and occult found-imagery to celebrate tantric alchemy and the divine feminine—what the artist describes as the “joy of entering the Technicolor dream with the restrictions gone, none of the bondage, just liberation and freedom.”

Penny Slinger graduated from the Chelsea College of Art, London, in 1969. She has authored and illustrated numerous publications and has exhibited her work internationally, including in Lips Painted Red, Trondheim Kunstmuseum, Trondheim, Norway; The Dark Monarch, Tate St. Ives, St. Ives, UK; Angels of Anarchy, Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester, UK; Surrealism Unlimited 1968-1978, Camden Arts Centre, London, UK; XII Bienal de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil; and Young and Fantastic, Institute of Contemporary Art, London, UK.