Sylvia Sleigh was born in Wales, but moved to the United States in 1961 and settled in New York, where she lived for the rest of her life. Upon the emergence of feminism in the United States in the early 1970s, Sleigh established herself as a prominent artist, in particular by painting portraits of male and female models, both nude and clothed, which are characterised by strong colours and a love of decorative details. She found her models among writers, actors, musicians, and her fellow artists: hence her paintings serve also as a map of the dynamic art scene of the 1960s and ’70s in New York. In these portraits, she combined bold sensuality with a personal feminism that placed her at the heart of a discourse on power, representation, and gender. This discourse, which can be considered an exploration of traditional academic painting’s fundamental guidelines, also entailed a break with an apparently deadlocked power relation between a portrait’s artist and subject.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition
Working at Home at Freymond-Guth Fine Arts
August 26th – October 2nd, 2010