Sylvia Sleigh
(Wales-United States of America, 08/05/1916 - 24/10/2010)
Born in Llandudno, Wales, Sleigh initially intended to pursue a career in fashion, studying at the Brighton School of Art and eventually opening her own boutique where she made hats, coats and dresses until the outbreak of World War II forced the shops closure. Moving to London in 1941, she began painting and enrolled in classes at the University of London, holding her first solo exhibition at the Kensington Art Gallery in 1953. The following year, she married art critic and curator Lawrence Alloway, with whom she moved to New York in 1961.
Amid the intellectual and artistic ferment of New York City, she established a practice that remained resolutely committed to the painted figure when abstraction and conceptualism increasingly dominated contemporary art. The distinctive style of figurative portraiture she developed in the post-war city is neither nostalgic nor detached, but a deliberate engagement of the body, the individual and the relationships between artist and sitter, forming the seminal interrogation of the politics of looking.
Her portraits resisting the anonymity that has historically accompanied the representation of the nude, her portraits instead insist upon bodies as sites of personality, vulnerability and agency. In Sleigh’s hands, looking becomes an intimate encounter in which the distance between artist, subject and viewer is continuously renegotiated.
This concern acquires particular force in Sleigh’s paintings of the male nude. Throughout the history of Western art, the female body had overwhelmingly occupied the position of the looked-at object, idealised and eroticised for a presumed male viewer, yet Sleigh disrupted this inherited arrangement by placing men (often themselves in New York’s art scene) within compositions that recall the canonical imagery of the female nude. Sleigh’s intention, however, was not simply to reverse the direction of the gaze. Rather, she proposed an alternative model of representation grounded in reciprocity and recognition where her sitters are exposed but not diminished and her paintings make room for eroticism while simultaneously insisting upon the humanity of the person who is being seen.
In New York she became closely involved with the emerging feminist art movement and in 1973 was a co-founder of Soho-20 Gallery, an artist-run space devoted to the work of women. She was also a member of A.I.R. Gallery, contributing to a broader collective effort to challenge the gendered exclusions of the established art world. Her social and artistic circles became an important source for her painting, and her portraits preserve an unusually intimate record of the communities in which she lived and worked.
Nevertheless, to understand Sleigh solely through the lens of feminist art is to understate the extent and complexity of her achievement. Her practice also constitutes a sustained meditation on the possibilities of realism itself. At a time when painting was frequently understood through the language of formal innovation or rupture, Sleigh found radical potential in attentiveness, looking slowly, painting carefully and ensuring her sitter’s individuality remained visible. Her portraits, ranging from women and men, couples and groups, landscapes and domestic interiors, share this commitment to the dignity of sustained observation.
Throughout her long career, Sleigh transformed conventions inherited from European painting into a distinctly contemporary language of intimacy. During her lifetime, her work was featured in more than 45 solo exhibitions and can now be found in the permanent collections of leading art institutions including Tate Modern, the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Art Institute of Chicago and the National Museum of Women in the Arts.
Image: Sylvia Sleigh, Working at Home (1969). Oil on canvas, 142.2 x 81.3 cm. Hauser & Wirth Collection, Switzerland.
