The Sitters

Melbourne Art Fair 2026

Mary Cherry Contemporary Booth - Melbourne Convention & Exhibition Centre

For our Melbourne Art Fair debut, Mary Cherry is thrilled to present a new body of work by Ruth O'Leary. Extending her solo exhibition ‘Hidden Mothers’ Ruth O'Leary presents new work that shifts from the maternal body to the politics of looking. Using an analogue photo booth as stage, O'Leary creates portraits where her face, obscured by painted textiles and costumes, becomes deliberately unrecognizable. Where Hidden Mothers centred the torso as site of maternal labor, these photographs interrogate the role of woman as muse within art history. O'Leary transforms herself into anonymous figures, refusing the traditional dynamic of woman-as-muse while examining the seductive pull of that very position. 

'The Sitters' interrogates the anonymous women who served as muses within early twentieth-century Western art. These figures, Matisse's Marguerite, Picasso's Marie-Thérèse, Modigliani's Jeanne, remain recognizable only through the canonical male artists who painted them. Art history has preserved the painter's vision while erasing the sitter's identity and agency. Using painted fabric, costumes, and props, each image is captured in a single exposure then enlarged into archival prints. The transformation from the booth's modest output to large scale, amplifies what has been historically diminished, making visible what modernism rendered marginal. The photo booth, now a century old, carries a temporal ambiguity. Neither entirely historical nor contemporary, it allows O'Leary to collapse distance between early modernist representation and feminist intervention. By occupying the same position as these historically silenced women, she reconstructs the male gaze upon itself, transforming portraits of passive muses into self-authored images where the female subject commands both production and meaning.

Alongside the photographs, O'Leary presents a new series of 'Fuck Paintings', text-based works that embody the tension between refusal and acceptance, addressing the complexity of inhabiting identities that art history has constrained.