Maude Léonard-Contant

Canadian-Swiss artist Maude Léonard-Contant's imagery is nourished by language-the shape of letters, words, and fragments of sentences. It is manifested in idiosyncratic, often space-filling works that are spread out on the floor. Language is palpable even when her installations are barely comprehensible. Léonard-Contant navigates the nonverbal through meticulous articulation of shapes and surfaces, textures, and space. Her engagement with materials she loves and which she carefully selects for their erotic and narrative potential forms a syntax with which meaning is created and narratives unfold. Maude Léonard-Contant: gatherings features a series of four site-specific works the artist created between 2023 and 2025 for displays in museums in Switzerland, Italy, and France. Texts by Maude Léonard-Contant, as well as essays contributed by writer and critic Estelle Hoy, curator Elise Lammer, and art historian Gabriela Christen, supplement the images.

Maude Léonard-Contant, born 1979, studied at Concordia University in Tio'tia:ke/Montreal and at the Glasgow School of Art, has been based in Switzerland since 2013. Her work, for which she has received numerous awards, is regularly shown in solo and group exhibitions in Switzerland and abroad. Nidwaldner Museum, with its three locations in Stans, Switzerland, offers a program of temporary exhibitions on themes related to the canton of Nidwalden and of contemporary art related to Central Switzerland, and documents the region's art and cultural heritage.