Sylvia Sleigh
Freymond-Guth Fine Arts, Zurich, Switzerland
Max Warsh Seated Nude (2006)
A blonde woman in a striped shirt looks out from the canvas at visitors as they enter the gallery. In the background, a man sits at a desk. Orderly bookshelves, classic designer furniture and the smart casual attire of the figures create a formal, slightly tense atmosphere. As the opening work in Sylvia Sleigh’s first solo show in Europe since 1962, Working at Home (1969) takes on a programmatic quality, as the artist often situates the subjects of her portraits in interiors, back gardens or their own homes.
Working at Home (1969)
Born in Wales in 1916 and a naturalized New Yorker since the early 1960s, Sleigh has always worked with figurative painting, in which she trained in the 1930s. Unfazed by the changing tides of style and the many declarations of the death of her preferred medium, she has focused primarily on making paintings of critics, curators and artists in a male-dominated art scene. The fact that her subjects are often naked is not the only inversion of Modernist visual conventions here, as artistic abstraction and functional design feature in her pictures like decorative museum pieces. Sleigh’s portraits of a melancholy educated middle class come across as a peopled version of Louise Lawler’s photographs of art behind-the-scenes in museums, which in the 1980s were perceived as institutional critique.
Arakawa and Madeline Gins (1971)
In spite of a realistic style that takes it lead from art-historical icons including Giorgione, Botticelli and Ingres, Sleigh’s representations of rooms and figures often depart from this line. Towards the edges, foreshortened or overstretched perspectives flow into two-dimensional ornaments, as in the opening picture where the outlines of the female figure become lost in the pattern on her stockings and the bright red leaves of an indoor plant. The vines of a green-leaved plant wind in peculiar transparency around the foot of the adjacent Egg chair designed by Arne Jacobsen.
In Max Warsh Seated Nude (2006), a naked man leans back into the black leather of an Eames Lounge Chair from 1956. In the painting hung next to it, an unclad woman sits on the corresponding ottoman. Although these items of furniture are renowned for their comfort, neither sitter appears particularly relaxed. On the contrary, the male figure grips the armrests, while the left hand of his female counterpart is tightly clasped around her upper right arm. Both direct their concentrated gazes out past the viewer. On the tidy bookshelf behind Max, we can read some of the titles: ‘Jackson Pollock’, ‘Juan Gris’, ‘Gorky’, ‘Sylvia Sleigh’. On these insignia of the educated middle-class home, the artist quite literally inscribes herself into the ancestral line of male artists.
Although perceived as a feminist in her artistic practice and as co-founder of A.I.R. Gallery (whose 21 members also included Nancy Spero) and SOHO20 Gallery, Sleigh’s position within this context is not uncontroversial. Charges of naïve painting and of implicitly perpetuating conventional power structures are often levelled against her. In their book, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (1981), for example, Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock argue that simply inverting the status quo is not enough to break male dominance. Not least her recent participation in the survey show ‘WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution’ at MoCA, Los Angeles in 2007 confirms the historical significance of her work. But Sleigh has never limited herself purely to a feminist context, instead pursuing a more general questioning of representation in art. As such, her work is also an important point of reference for institutional critique and for contemporary painters such as Elizabeth Peyton and Raffi Kalenderian.
Burkhard Meltzer
Translated by Nicholas Grindell
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