SALZBURG.- Engaging with the mechanics of materialistic desire, aesthetics and the construction of value, Sylvie Fleury’s sleek, alluring works provide a lens through which contemporary politics of gender, beauty and consumerism can be re-evaluated. The exhibition presents new sculptures, including works from one of the artist’s most recent series, showing crossed legs made of lacquered fibreglass suspended on the wall, like the bottom half of a mannequin. Since her Shopping Bag sculptures from the 1990s, appropriating and recontextualising luxury consumer items has been a recurring theme in Fleury’s work. As a testament to the lineage of the readymade, the legs are draped with coats from a luxury fashion house.
The neons on view, meanwhile, encompass two decades of Fleury’s investigation of the medium. Like many of her sculptures, they form an art-historical gesture, drawing on Conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth’s principle that ‘art is making meaning’ and relating it to slogans and jingles, provocatively harnessing it to engage with and call into question the mechanics of the beauty industry. The name of a perfume, Lancôme’s Ô, is instantly recognisable through its distinctive font. Here, Fleury returns – with cynicism but always a touch of fondness – to the trappings of consumer society and our related fixations and aspirations.
A series of large-scale paintings will be on view alongside Fleury’s sculptures. The V-shaped canvases covered in even, parallel stripes reference Frank Stella’s geometric ‘pinstripe’-paintings. Fleury renders the iconic minimal shapes in shimmering pastel colours, highlighting how high art and luxury culture operate through similar systems of desire, while also questioning the structures of power attached to these commodities.
Sylvie Fleury was born in 1961 in Geneva, where she lives and works. Fleury has had numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout Europe and the United States. Recent solo exhibitions include the Mrac Musée régional d’art contemporain, Sérignan (2025); Museum der Moderne, Salzburg (2025); Kunsthal Rotterdam
(2024); Kunst Museum Winterthur (2023); Pinacoteca Agnelli, Turin (2022); Kunstraum Dornbirn (2019); Istituto Svizzero, Rome (2019); Villa Stuck, Munich (2016); Eternity Now, as part of the permanent collection at the Bass Museum, Miami (2017 and 2015); Centro de arte contemporaneo de Málaga (2011); and MAMCO Genève (2008). Her work has also been presented in group shows internationally, including at the Performa Biennial, New York (2025); the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2024); the Museum of Arts and Design, New York (2022); the ARKEN Museum for Moderne Kunst, Ishøj (2020); the Daimler Contemporary, Berlin (2019); Leopold Museum, Vienna (2018); Kunsthaus Zürich (2018); Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zürich (2016); SCHAUWERK Sindelfingen (2014); Kunstverein Hannover (2011); and Kunstverein Frankfurt (2011). In 2018 she was awarded Switzerland’s Prix Meret Oppenheim and in 2015 received the Société des Arts de Genève Prize.
