Opening 5 June 2026
Spanning both levels of the Musée Rath, this off-site exhibition presented by the MAMCO juxtaposes a retrospective dedicated to the British artist Sylvia Sleigh (1916–2010) with a polygraphic project titled Refaire Collection, offering a feminist re-reading of the canons of art history.
The ground floor is devoted to the work of Sylvia Sleigh. A Welsh painter who settled in New York in 1962, she produced the bulk of her oeuvre during the 1960s & 1970s, a period in which she interrogated the gendered conventions inherited from Western art history. Her approach is distinguished above all by an inversion of roles, substituting the male nude for the classical female nude, and by intimate portraits of the New York artistic and intellectual community captured in domestic settings. An engaged member of feminist collectives such as A.I.R. and SoHo 20, Sleigh structures the exhibition in five parts: a revisiting of art history icons (the odalisque, Orientalism, the Renaissance) through the lens of gender; a section dedicated to self-portraiture and the Sister Chapel project; a tribute to the New York scene of the 1970s; and finally, two spaces exploring the nude, highlighting how Sleigh privileged individuality, ornamentation, and the textures of the hippie counterculture.
Echoing this practice, the lower level presents the exhibition Refaire Collection, which provides a historical framework for Sleigh’s approach while posing a fundamental question: how to reimagine a collection when works by women are structurally underrepresented? Confronting biases in acquisition and valorization, this project imagines new lineages by drawing on the holdings of the MAMCO as well as Swiss institutional & private collections. Spanning a century of creation, from Jacqueline Marval to Jenna Gribbon, the display brings together paintings, sculptures, videos, drawings, & photographs by artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Meret Oppenheim, Pipilotti Rist, Joan Semmel, & the Guerrilla Girls. Centered on themes of bodily representation, sorority, & empowerment, these works dialogue with those of Sleigh to question our relationship to art history.
@mamco_geneve #sylviasleigh
