Maude Léonard-Contant
b. 1979, Canada
Lives and works in Basel, Switzerland
How the Heat Wilts my Silks, 2024
Maude Léonard-Contant’s work draws on language—its forms, gaps, and translations—while referencing everyday objects like ceramic vessels or furniture. Her installations become spaces for reflection, inviting us to consider the structures, both mental and physical, that shape human experience.
Maude Léonard-Contant is a Swiss-Canadian artist whose work examines the materiality and poetics of language—its physical presence, silent echoes, and shifting legibility. Based in Basel, she works across sculpture, installation, and writing to explore the traces of language that exist beyond words: how we measure, name, remember, and inhabit meaning through form.
Her sculptural environments are shaped by an attentiveness to scale, syntax, and atmosphere. Referencing the structure of vessels, furniture, or writing tools, her works invite slow observation, echoing the rhythm of a sentence or gesture. Materials such as bamboo, silk, sand, fonts, and insulating film form a tactile vocabulary. Together, they compose a kind of nonverbal grammar, one that speaks through surface and shape as much as through text.
Often drawing from linguistic displacement, Léonard-Contant plays with translation, transcription, and the quiet gaps between languages. Naming and describing—ferns, gestures, swamps, hills—become ways of attending to the world, of both holding on and letting go. Her installations create spaces for listening, thinking, and shared reflection. They measure the body’s relation to its surroundings while suggesting alternate ways to dwell within language.
Recent solo exhibitions include: gathering, Nidwaldner Museum, Stans (2025); Spot on, Kunstmuseum Luzern (2023); No Edit Can Fail Tint, Kunstmuseum Luzern (2020); and Figures, Terrain, Bern (2019). Her work has also been featured in group and duo exhibitions such as N.N., Grand Palais, Bern (2025); NYX, Istituto Svizzero, Milan (2024); Les Phalènes, CRAC Alsace, Altkirch (2024); How Language Invests the World, Bünder Kunstmuseum, Chur (2024); Knuckles Down, Mayday, Basel (2021); Erde tauschen, Zschokke Atelier, Basel (2021); The Words We Live In, Binz39, Zurich (2019); and Beyond the Real, Kunsthalle Basel (2016).
Her sculptural environments are shaped by an attentiveness to scale, syntax, and atmosphere. Referencing the structure of vessels, furniture, or writing tools, her works invite slow observation, echoing the rhythm of a sentence or gesture. Materials such as bamboo, silk, sand, fonts, and insulating film form a tactile vocabulary. Together, they compose a kind of nonverbal grammar, one that speaks through surface and shape as much as through text.
Often drawing from linguistic displacement, Léonard-Contant plays with translation, transcription, and the quiet gaps between languages. Naming and describing—ferns, gestures, swamps, hills—become ways of attending to the world, of both holding on and letting go. Her installations create spaces for listening, thinking, and shared reflection. They measure the body’s relation to its surroundings while suggesting alternate ways to dwell within language.
Recent solo exhibitions include: gathering, Nidwaldner Museum, Stans (2025); Spot on, Kunstmuseum Luzern (2023); No Edit Can Fail Tint, Kunstmuseum Luzern (2020); and Figures, Terrain, Bern (2019). Her work has also been featured in group and duo exhibitions such as N.N., Grand Palais, Bern (2025); NYX, Istituto Svizzero, Milan (2024); Les Phalènes, CRAC Alsace, Altkirch (2024); How Language Invests the World, Bünder Kunstmuseum, Chur (2024); Knuckles Down, Mayday, Basel (2021); Erde tauschen, Zschokke Atelier, Basel (2021); The Words We Live In, Binz39, Zurich (2019); and Beyond the Real, Kunsthalle Basel (2016).
Artworks
Mes ancolies, 2023
Untitled, 2019
Bedrock Stories, 2022
Longed for Stoneware, 2019
Untitled, 2019
Selected Exhibitions
NYX
16 May - 5 Jul 2024
Istituto Svizzero Milano, Italy
Istituto Svizzero Milano, Italy
Spot on
Jun 10 – Sep 17 2022
Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland
Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland
How Language Invents the World
24 Feb – 28 Jul 2024
Bündner Kunstmuseum, Switzerland
Bündner Kunstmuseum, Switzerland
Digs
Sep 9 – Nov 13 2022
Kunsthaus Baselland, Switzerland
Kunsthaus Baselland, Switzerland
Press
Publications
Text by Distanz Verlag
The hypothesis that the world was once sustained by grand established narratives may feel reassuring but has in fact long been refuted. The diverse linguistic and cultural landscape of the Swiss canton of Grisons serves as point of departure for the project Wie Sprache die Welt erfindet, (How Language Invents the World). In the group exhibition and this publication the Bündner Kunstmuseum investigates the significance of language, narrative spaces, and stories in communities and society and applies these specific regional characteristics to the prevailing structures of storytelling.
The publication illustrates the socially transformative potential of languages and narratives from the perspective of visual art and literature. Complementing the works, literary writings by Gianna Olinda Cadonau, Asa S. Hendry, Marina Skalova, Joachim B. Schmidt, Usama Al Shahmani, Vincenzo Todisco, and Ivna Žic delineate the book’s thematic framework, probing the speculative question: Which narratives have the potential to engender novel perspectives on the world and establish a deeper connection to ourselves and our environment? With an introduction by artistic director Stephan Kunz and an essay by curator Damian Jurt.
Artists: Carl Andre, Arman, Irma Blank, Marcel Broodthaers, Alois Carigiet, Christo, Gion Casper Collenberg, Marcel Duchamp, John Furnival, Gilbert & George, Eugen Gomringer, Ian Hamilton Finlay / David Ballantyne, Susan Hiller, Karla Hiraldo Voleau, Thomas Hirschhorn / Marcus Steinweg, Jenny Holzer, Rebecca Horn, Vicente Huidobro, Bethan Huws, Marcel Janco, Pascal Lampert, Maude Léonard-Contant, Annette Kelm, Jan Kiefer, Barbara Kruger, Bruce Nauman, Seiichi Niikuni / Pierre Garnier, Meret Oppenheim, Hans Op de Beeck, Erica Pedretti, VALIE EXPORT, Francis Picabia, Julien Prévieux, Dieter Roth, Kurt Schwitters, Zineb Sedira, Augustas Serapinas, André Thomkins, Nora Turato, Jacques de la Villeglé, Not Vital, Kemang Wa Lehulere, Ruth and Robert Wolf-Rehfeldt
Year: 2024
Editor: Damian Jurt / Bündner Kunstmuseum Chur
Languages: German, Arabic, French, Icelandic, Italian, Romansh
Format: 20 × 27 cm
Details: 288 pages, 160 color illustrations, flexcover
ISBN: 978-3-95476-631-4
Maude Léonard-Contant
Écoute, la croûte se fend
With texts by Claire Hoffmann, Maude Léonard-Contant, Jeremy Narby and Camilla Paolino.
Maude Léonard-Contant's art intertwines language and matter. Naming and describing, selecting and processing materials allow her to foster intimacy with Things, both paying tribute to them and bidding them farewell. Listen, the crust is cracking presents the first-ever comprehensive overview of the artist’s universe with over one-hundred images. Her acute awareness of how language shapes reality and her haiku-like notes form a common thread that runs through the publication. Texts from the perspective of art history and anthropology place Leonard-Contant's installations and objects in the context of feminist and political art history and expand the gaze to holistic, non-anthropocentric ways of life. The design of the book, with its perforated binding and distinctive typography reflects the materiality of Léonard-Contant's work.
Year: 2023
Publisher: City of Lucerne, Kunstmuseum Luzern
Publisher: Mousse
Graphic: Bonbon, Diego Bontognali
Size: 144 pages, e/d/f
ISBN: 978-88-6749-582-5