Sylvie Fleury

Reference monograph

Known in the 1990s for her mises-en-scènes of glamour, fashion, and luxury products, Sylvie Fleury (b. 1961, lives and works in Geneva) demonstrates a detailed knowledge of Pop and Minimal aesthetics. An affirmation of the consumer society and its values at first glance, the work simultaneously offers a different reading: by blurring codes and organizing the contamination of one sphere by an other (the masculine world by the feminine, fashion by art or advertising—or perhaps the other way around), it also appears provocative and political. In that sense, Sylvie Fleury’s work reflects and anticipates her epoch just as it participates in it.

After some years in New York in the early 1980s spent learning photography, developing her interest in cinema, and experiencing the night life, she returned to Geneva and “confronted” her reflections next to those of John Armleder and Olivier Mosset. From her early “shopping bags” installations to her bronze rendering of luxury clothing and cosmetics, through her exploration of car culture and the world of Formula 1, she revisited modern and contemporary art icons such as Piet Mondrian, Andy Warhol, and John McCracken, and developed a formal idiom far more complex and disconcerting than many of her contemporaries.

In her attempt to come to terms with the fetishistic attachment to material goods that is the defining feature of the world of fashion, Fleury then turned to magic light phenomena—colorful rooms, glossy surfaces, auras, pendulums, and crystals. These works from the 2000s are presented together for the first time with her classic pieces from the 1990s in this reference monograph. It thus offers readers a new way to register Fleury’s contribution to the art of the last decades.

Published in collaboration with Société des arts, Geneva and the support of Salon 94, New York; Mehdi Chouakri, Berlin; and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris/Salzburg.