Sylvia Sleigh and the Re:Gaze
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During the 1970s, the telephone in Sylvia Sleigh’s New York City apartment began ringing more than usual, and for years it didn’t stop. Men who had seen her paintings of other nude men called to ask if she might like to paint them, too. “Weird,” her friend and artist Dennis Adrian later recalled. “Creepy.” Some of the callers apparently had rather more in mind than portraiture. Sleigh eventually found a way of dealing with them, and would ask, “Well, are you very, very handsome?” 1<a href=”https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-dennis-adrian-17346?utm_source=chatgpt.com%5B/mfn%5D”>https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-dennis-adrian-17346?utm_source=chatgpt.com
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Funny how exhibitionist appeal seems to disappear when we are no longer in control of how we are being looked at. The men had called wanting to place themselves before her gaze; but found themselves being truly seen.
Standing in front of Sleigh’s painted portraits at Geneva’s Musée Rath, I found myself looking very closely at thousands of individual hairs. Each strand is unapologetically there.
Can I find these gruesome little hairs on these men beautiful, even when I am not meant to on myself? There are other equally gruesome, equally beautiful details: the engorged veins on a hand, that make the bodies feel specific and personal rather than idealised.
This is why it is tempting, but ultimately reductive, to describe Sleigh’s paintings as any form of gender-swapping, as they have sometimes been described. The point is not simply that women can look at nude men instead of men looking at nude women. Sleigh changes the terms of the encounter by making the act of looking part of the subject itself. The person being looked at remains a person, with all the particularities that looking closely will reveal about them.
It is apparent in the pictures that Sleigh is there with them, not only in the room but invariably as part of the composition. Sometimes she appears literally, through a mirror; elsewhere, her presence is felt in the sustained attention she gives to the people she paints. More often, her presence is harder to locate: it is in the information she chooses to give us, in the way a body is seen from one angle and then another, and in the things that make us hesitate over where, exactly, to look. She shows us how we, too, become part of the gaze in what it makes us feel about what we see, what we look at first, what is embarrassing on which to let our eyes linger.
Within one work, the sitter is often portrayed in a state of becoming. There are multiple gazes at work at once: Sleigh looking at her subject, the subject sometimes looking back, and eventually us looking at them both. Using human dignity as a foundational layer, the paintings turn looking into an ongoing process of finding out what else is there.
Sleigh was born in Wales in 1916 and settled in New York in 1962 when her second husband, Lawrence Alloway, was offered a job teaching Modern Art history at Bennington College. Explaining that she was lonely at first, not knowing anyone, she filled her time with painting and got to know people by painting portraits of them, starting with the art faculty.
She gradually established herself among a circle of artists, writers, and critics, many of who sat for her in her own home as she developed her signature, feminist approach to figurative realism. Over the years, a space takes shape through the paintings, oriented through recognisable fixtures like a floral sofa, a big red chair, and an ever-recurring unexpected red.
Sleigh’s own bright, boldly coloured clothes speak the same visual language as the riot of patterns around her, reflecting her quintessentially British taste for busy, patterned interiors. When a friend once asked her to describe her work in a few words, Sleigh answered, “Love and Joy.”2https://myartspace-blog.blogspot.com/2007/11/art-space-talk-sylvia-sleigh.html?utm_source=chatgpt.com Looking at these paintings, it is clear how much she meant it, if only for the fact that inside the portraits, it is apparent that relationships are developing.
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By the 1970s, Sleigh was working in a New York art world increasingly shaped by the second-wave feminist movement and a growing network of women artists’ organisations and exhibitions. Her A.I.R. Group Portrait brings together the women of the artists’ co-op. The group is all present without anyone becoming a single type of woman, each of them painted to be recognisably herself.
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Downstairs, Refaire collection expands this history across more than a century of women making and looking at images of the body. It also marks the return of a familiar MAMCO format: a second exhibition conceived in dialogue with the main show, which the museum has not presented since its building closed for renovation. With the renovation still ongoing, Refaire collection is the first time MAMCO has revived the format as part of its off-site programme.
Leonor Fini’s 1942 paintings of a woman and her male model, Nico Papatakis, place their bodies in related reclining poses. Alice Neel takes the male nude somewhere stranger in Joe Gould: Gould appears as an ogre-like Greenwich Village satyr, surrounded by two anonymous nude bodies. There are penises everywhere — he has one, his penis has a penis, even his belly button seems to sprout one. He looks directly at us, smiling. The male body here is grotesque, awkward, funny, and unnervingly charming.
Suzanne Santoro’s Mount of Venus (1971) brings the female body so close that it departs entirely from a conventional nude. The life-size resin cast isolates the artist’s own pubic area, giving us an unusually intimate view of the body. There is no face, pose, or narrative to distract from the body (part) itself.
What might ordinarily be hidden, edited, or made erotic becomes the thing being examined. Louise Bourgeois’s Multiple brings the domestic sphere into the picture. Made late in her career, the work places a small female figure inside a metal display case, her head replaced by a kitchen whisk.
The works downstairs approach the body in radically different ways: as something to reclaim, examine, desire, mock, or contain. Taken together, they make it difficult to speak of a single way of looking at the body, or a single meaning attached to being the person who gazes. Sleigh’s own male nudes occupy poses borrowed from the canon of the female nude: reclining, resting, turning towards or away from the viewer.
It would be easy to call this a reversal of the traditional arrangement, and in some cases Sleigh made the reference explicit. But the men in her paintings are not anonymous specimens of “the male body.” They have names, professions, personalities and relationships. They were people Sleigh knew and, in many cases, loved.
Especially Alloway. Sleigh painted him more than fifty times. She called him her “muse” and her “Apollo”.3https://ruthmillington.co.uk/male-muses/ In one self-portrait, he appears as a tiny figure in the background, forever a subject of her gaze. The point seems less to be that a man can occupy the place traditionally assigned to a woman than that this particular man could occupy it because she wanted to look at him.
Sleigh was not shy about calling herself a feminist, nor did she accept that feminism required women to hate men. “It is important not to hate men – they are here to stay!”4https://myartspace-blog.blogspot.com/2007/11/art-space-talk-sylvia-sleigh.html?utm_source=chatgpt.com she wrote. For her, equality was a partnership that could make both sexes less invested in superiority.
The feminist history surrounding Sleigh had good reason to concern itself with who gets to look and who gets turned into imagery. Women had spent centuries being made visible on terms determined by someone else, so reclaiming the right to represent the female body was bound up with reclaiming the right to look. But Sleigh’s paintings leave room for the visceral reasons to cast a gaze.
Today, the “female gaze” is a familiar way of talking about women’s desire and sexual subjectivity. It can also come with its own instructions: women should desire differently, reject men, embrace men, distrust traditional relationships.
The possibilities multiply, but so do the rules about what those possibilities are supposed to mean. Sleigh’s paintings offer something more generous: the freedom to be curious about what we see, to find pleasure in it, and to decide for ourselves what it means.
Sylvia Sleigh and Re-Collection: An Exhibition in Two Parts
MAMCO X MAH
05.06—25.10.2026
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