Sylvie Fleury

Sylvie Fleury (b. 1961, Geneva, Switzerland) lives and works in Geneva. She emerged on the international contemporary art scene in the early 1990s, beginning with her first exhibition at Galerie Rivolta in Lausanne in 1990. From the outset, her practice developed around the intersection of contemporary art, fashion, luxury, and consumer culture, using familiar objects and visual codes associated with glamour and consumption as material for artistic transformation. Fleury works across sculpture, installation, painting, photography, video, and other media. Her practice frequently appropriates objects and images associated with fashion, cosmetics, automotive culture, New Age spirituality, and popular consumer culture, placing them in dialogue with references to modernist art and the history of sculpture. Shopping bags, luxury goods, cosmetics, artificial fur, neon, rockets, and other recognisable forms recur throughout her work, often shifting between the status of commodity, image, and artwork. Her approach has been described by the Swiss Federal Office of Culture as a distinctive feminist engagement with glamour, fashion, and luxury, in which brands and labels are recontextualised through the language of contemporary art. A recurring strategy in Fleury’s work is the collision of apparently opposed cultural languages. She has revisited canonical modernist forms through materials and imagery associated with fashion and consumer goods, while also incorporating references to specialised subcultures such as New Age and science fiction. At MAMCO Genève, her 1996 exhibition *First Spaceship on Venus* brought together sculptures, videos, silkscreens, murals, and other works in an environment where modernist references, luxury, fantasy, and consumer desire were deliberately placed in tension. Her practice thereby questions the systems of value through which objects acquire cultural and economic meaning. Fleury has exhibited internationally since the early 1990s, including at the Venice, São Paulo, San Marino, and Shanghai Biennales and at institutions such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, ZKM in Karlsruhe, the National Gallery of Australia, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Lyon. Her solo exhibitions have included presentations at MAMCO Genève, Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Zurich, ZKM Museum für Neue Kunst in Karlsruhe, Le Magasin in Grenoble, the Bass Museum of Art in Miami, CAC Málaga, Villa Stuck in Munich, and the Istituto Svizzero in Rome. Fleury received the Prix de la Société des Arts de Genève in 2015 in recognition of her body of work and continuing research. In 2018, she was awarded the Swiss Grand Prix for Art / Prix Meret Oppenheim together with Thomas Hirschhorn and architect Luigi Snozzi. The Federal Office of Culture recognised her for a practice that has, since the 1990s, developed a distinctive engagement with glamour, fashion, luxury, and consumer culture. Across more than three decades, Fleury has continued to use the languages of fashion, luxury, popular culture, and consumerism as a means of reconsidering established distinctions between high and popular culture. Her work combines appropriation, humour, material seduction, and references to art history, creating situations in which objects associated with desire and consumption are reconsidered within the context of contemporary art.