Sylvie Fleury’s practice produces enticing works which let art, consumerism and life collide. Speaking to contemporary conditions, her sculptures, paintings, neon pieces and videos continue to defy expectations and definitions and remain plural. Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers are pleased to announce an extensive exhibition at Sprüth Magers, London, celebrating the gallery’s longstanding relationship with the artist and providing an insight into her spectacular and varied body of work spanning three decades. Transforming all of the gallery’s spaces, Fleury uses the strategies of the fashion, beauty and advertising industries to challenge paradigms of Western art history, its male modernist canon as well as examine the art world’s complicity with the dynamics of consumerism. Alongside several of Fleury’s iconic pieces, new works produced especially for the show will be on display.
The investigation into the creation of endless, insatiable desire is a throughline in the artist’s boundary-pushing career. Drawing from the fields of fashion, pop culture, car racing, cinema and science fiction, she has created an alluring and deceptively straightforward visual vocabulary with which she constructs surprising narratives.
Interested in paraphernalia (originally a legal term that denotes a married woman’s property besides her dowry) that is dismissed as being superficial precisely because of its female connotations, Fleury twists the implied gendered rituals and obsessions, asking audiences to think critically about the world’s design. Commenting on the protagonists of Minimalism, such as Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Sol LeWitt or Carl Andre, she engages in polarities and contradictions to question the status of the artistic artifact. By letting art and fashion converge in her work, Fleury both renegotiates art’s limits and reflects on how the construction of our identity is often mediated by the commercial goods or cultural products we are drawn to.
References to the project She-DevilonWheels– a motoring club for women only, founded by Fleury in the 1990s after being refused membership to a car-racing club – suggest the organization set up its headquarters amid several artworks. First SpaceshiponVenus is a series that delves into the imagery around science fiction and outer space, questioning its machismo. Creating rockets in a range of media, Fleury satirizes their phallic symbolism by employing colors and materials associated with “femininity.” Frankie Goes to Hollywood, the series of monochromatic hard-edge paintings that echo Frank Stella’s works, consist of meticulously applied layers of
