Sylvia Sleigh was an American realist painter born in Llandudno, Wales, best known for her feminist reimagining of the nude and portrait genres. She studied in the Brighton School of Art, where early on she identified a gap in the curriculum: the double standards that permitted female nudes but excluded male ones in life drawing classes. In 1961, Sleigh, relocated from London to New York with her husband Lawrence Alloway. There, the couple became deeply embroiled in an overlapping milieu of artists and intellectuals, bolstered by Alloway’s ties to prominent art-world figures and Sleigh’s acquaintance with leading female figurative artists through her involvement in women’s cooperatives such as A.I.R Gallery and SOHO 20 Gallery. Sleigh first gained recognition in the 1960s for her nude portraits of men and women, which reimagined poses traditionally associated with female subjects in art history, drawing inspiration from the Turkish bath scenes of Giorgione, Titian, and Manet and the visual vocabulary of the Pre-Raphaelites. Rather than sexualizing her subjects or simply inverting the male gaze, Sleigh emphasized their personalities, balancing a cold-eyed realism with subtle idealization. Many of her subjects were friends and family, often art-world insiders thanks to her proximity to Alloway. She embraced an iterative process, prolifically revisiting the same models. Sleigh also painted group portraits of the women artists she encountered in the cooperatives, including figures such as Agnes Denes, Nancy Spero and Howardena Pindell. Often, she cast her subjects as mythical or historical figures, imagining her community as individuals enacting near-mythic roles in their interactions with one another. Through this approach, Sleigh developed a distinctive form of Realism, prioritizing emotional resonance over photorealistic depiction. Reflecting on her work, Sleigh remarked: “I am primarily a portrait painter. In the past, portraiture and the nude were usually separate genres, but new expectations have been inspiring to me.”
Felicity Rainnie Reclining
107.3 x 152.4 cm