Sylvie Fleury
Born in Geneva in 1961.
Swiss · Contemporary art · installation, sculpture, painting and video.
Sylvie Fleury explores relationships between art, desire and consumption. Brands, fashion and luxury products form part of her visual vocabulary. Her feminist practice shifts the signs of prestige to question what gives an object value and how the images surrounding it shape our expectations.
Her Shopping Bags, presented at her first Lausanne exhibition in 1990, became emblematic of this approach. At MAMCO, First Spaceship on Venus combined several media in 1996. Rockets in nail-polish colours connected the imagery of space travel with the codes of beauty.
For Bedroom Ensemble II, made in 1998, she covered the furniture of a bedroom in artificial fur. MAMCO relates this installation to Claes Oldenburg’s bedrooms. Its altered textures introduce an artificial softness and invite viewers to reconsider familiar domestic objects and their visual appeal.
The cave created for her 2008 retrospective offers a more inward experience. Yet its title, borrowed from a perfume advertisement, retains a link to the marketplace. The installation brings the attraction of surfaces into contact with self-exploration, questioning a simple separation between appearance and inner experience.
In 2018, the Federal Office of Culture awarded her the Swiss Grand Award for Art / Prix Meret Oppenheim. This distinction recognises a practice that moves across media and reconsiders relationships between visual culture, identity and the ways in which people present themselves.
