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» SYLVIA
SLEIGH.
The Untimely Gaze
Opening: Thursday,
September 26 at 8 pm
Dates: September 27, 2013 - January 12, 2014
Curator: Katya García-Antón
Place: South Wing Exhibition
Session: Beyond Figura
Exhibition organised
by Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, CAPC musée d’ art contemporain
de Bordeaux, Tate Liverpool, Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen and Stiftelsen
Kunstnernes Hus
Sylvia Sleigh (Wales, 1916 - New York, 2010) remained true
to figurative painting throughout her lifetime, becoming an important
actor, portrayer and supporter of the feminist scene in New York
in the 1970s. Her portraiture liberated painting from the rigidity
of a male-dominated gaze, while insisting on the relevance of contemporary
dialogue with European painterly tradition. In Sleigh's portrayals
of the art world around her, critics, collectors and artists, male
and female, were rendered clothed, cross-dressed or nude. Hers was
an untimely, irritating, deeply personal, feminist perspective which
claimed an innovative space for the female gaze, ranged at the centre
of a burgeoning discourse around issues of hierarchy, representation
and gender that are still highly relevant today.
Indeed, her markedly sensual and sexual approach to oil painting attached great importance to details: at times the entire surface of the painting is densely inhabited. These tools were given a primary role in the construction of a new representational history which echoed sensitively with the momentous changes of her times. The crucial role Sleigh played in the development of feminist and gender-led aesthetic languages from the 1960s onwards was largely ignored until quite recently, when her oeuvre began to attract attention as a result of ground-breaking exhibitions such as WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, held at MoCA Los Angeles in 2007.
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ADDITIONAL DOCUMENTATION |
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