Sylvie Fleury Starting in the late 1980s, the native Geneva artist Sylvie Fleury (1961) has helped herself to the richness of the world of objects and commodities. With her stylistically assured sensibility for the delightful liaison of various currents from the realms of visual culture, Sylvie Fleury has established a presence in international art circles. Over this period of creative activity, her installations, paintings and sculptures have already been presented in a number of solo and group exhibitions both in Switzerland and abroad. Luxury, fetishization of everyday objects and the interchangeability of high and mass culture denote central concepts of Sylvie Fleury's work, referring to her artistic strategy of using objects and materials from our familiar world of commodities nearly unaltered in her works. Thus, the "Shopping Bags' placed within the exhibition space remind one of an enthusiastically celebrated shopping tour; the cosmetic industry slogans, as applied onto the exhibition wall as text images and neon writing, promise beauty and youth; and the headlines of international fashion magazine covers, elevated to monumental proportions, can be read as the promises and utopias of our fashion and beauty culture. In transferring freely available materials to the context of art, the artist succeeds in showing the viewer (also the consumer) the fascination of the material aesthetic and therefore the seductive power of the "purely material". At the same time, her works make reference to the dissolving of (hierarchical) boundaries between art, design, fashion and advertising and to the mutual influence exerted among the various creative spheres of high and pop culture. Along with these objects of female desire from the world of luxury and glamour, a systematic and playful approach to the protagonists of male 20th century art history is also discernible in Fleury's works. Imitating Mondrian paintings in her use of colored fake fur, wrapping skyward bound rockets in fluffy fur material and having crumpled autos sprayed in the colors of the current lipstick collection, Fleury feminizes the "hard and fast' aesthetic of male status symbols and explores the subversive play with male and female clichés in the charged zone of feminine seduction strategies and male expansionary and display behavior. Sylvie Fleury's works are realized in fact via "shopping" which, elevated to the level of creative act, cultivates the artistic conception of desire, selection, buying and owning and at the same time presents the fascination of the banal and everyday. As beauty products and lifestyle magazines with their high-gloss aesthetic feed – and seemingly fulfill – our longing for beauty, youth and success, the upcoming exhibition embraces the aestheticization of pure buying pleasure and thus, in the translation of an everyday object into "high art" material, makes the gallery visitor aware of the seductive power of (seemingly) noble-appearing commodities. Exhibition: November 4 - December 23, 2000 Gallery hours: Tue-Fri noon 6 pm, Sat 11 am - 4 pm Galerie Hauser & Wirth & Presenhuber Limmatstrasse 270 8005 Zürich Telephone +41 1 446 80 60 Fax +41 1-446 80 65 www.ghwp.ch |
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