LONDON.- Daniel Malarkey is presenting the first commercial solo exhibition of works by Sylvia Sleigh in the UK in over 60 years. The exhibition marks the 110th anniversary of the artist’s birth and follows SF MOMA’s announcement of the acquisition of a major work by the artist earlier this year.

🎨 Discover the pioneering work of Sylvia Sleigh in this first retrospective monograph, available on Amazon, and explore how her realist paintings reshaped ideas of gender, portraiture, and desire.

This presentation brings together a selection of paintings spanning Sylvia Sleigh’s career, including the artist’s earliest known self-portrait (1941), still lifes, a landscape, additional portraits, and culminating in one of her most iconic works, The Bridge (1963), which has not been exhibited publicly in two decades. This reclining nude exemplifies the artist’s distinctive engagement with portraiture and the historical nude, reflecting her sustained interest in revisiting and reconfiguring canonical traditions.

Malarkey’s exhibition is unique in its inclusion of many works from Sleigh’s underexamined early years in London, prior to her move to New York in 1961.

Born in Llandudno in 1916, Sleigh became one of the most distinctive realist painters associated with the feminist art movement.

Sleigh studied at the Brighton School of Art between 1934 and 1937, where she first became aware of the gendered double standards within academic life-drawing classes that permitted female nudes while excluding male ones. Working as a dressmaker in Brighton, Sleigh relocated to London and pursued art. While attending art history evening classes through the University of London, taught at the National Gallery, she met the influential critic Lawrence Alloway, with whom she would form a lifelong partnership.

With the expansion of contemporary art in the United States and a temporary teaching appointment for Alloway, in 1961 the couple, Sleigh and Alloway, moved to New York City, where she became closely connected with a vibrant community of artists, writers, and critics. Through her involvement with pioneering women-led cooperatives including A.I.R. Gallery and SOHO 20 Gallery, Sleigh played an important role in the development of feminist artistic networks in the United States.

During the 1960s and 1970s she gained increasing recognition for intimate and psychologically nuanced portraits of friends, critics, and fellow artists. Drawing inspiration from historical precedents ranging from Giorgione and Titian to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Sleigh’s paintings subtly challenge the conventions of the “male gaze.” Rather than objectifying her subjects, she emphasised individuality, presence, and the relationship between artist and sitter.

Her sitters frequently included members of her immediate artistic community, among them Paul Rosano, Philip Golub, and Alloway himself, whom she painted more than fifty times. Sleigh also produced significant group portraits of women artists, including Agnes Denes, Nancy Spero, and Howardena Pindell, imagining her artistic community through compositions that evoke historical and mythological scenes.

Reflecting on her practice, Sleigh once 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.”

Sleigh lived and worked in New York City until she passed away in 2010.

Recent solo exhibitions include Ortuzar, New York, USA, 2025, and the Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, USA, 2023. Additional selected exhibitions: Tate Liverpool, Liverpool, UK, 2013; CAPC Musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux, Bordeaux, France, 2013; Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland, 2012; Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo, Norway, 2012; Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, USA, 1990; and Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, USA, 1990.

Her paintings are held in many major museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, among others.

This exhibition is realised with thanks to Parity Productions and Ludovica Villar-Hauser, whose assistance has been invaluable in bringing together this presentation.

A new monograph on the artist will be produced by MALARKEY publishing and launched in June/July 2026 with Bella Kesoyan as editor.

Sylvia Sleigh (1916–2010) was a Welsh-born, American painter whose work challenged traditional portraiture. In the obituary in The New York Times in October 2010, she was quoted:

“I feel that my paintings stress the equality of men and women (women and men) [...] To me, women were often portrayed as sex objects in humiliating poses. I wanted to give my perspective. I liked to portray both men and women as intelligent and thoughtful people with dignity and humanism that emphasized love and joy.”



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