Sylvie Fleury Homage to Furry Square (dark purple, fuchsia and orange), 2025

In Homage to Furry Square (dark purple, fuchsia and orange) (2025), Sylvie Fleury playfully subverts Joseph Albers’s illustrious Homage to the Square series, a body of more than one thousand works that he commenced in 1950 and pursued for the following twenty-five years. The Modernist artist sought to explore the subjective experience of colour by nesting polychromatic squares within one another to create an optical illusion whereby the planes seem to simultaneously advance and recede. Retaining Albers’s compositional structure, Fleury supplants oil paint with vibrant faux fur that seems to spill out of the picture plane, disrupting the original work’s rigid geometric lexis. With this unconventional medium, Fleury humorously invokes normative notions of femininity and frivolity to denounce the gender biases underpinning the art-historical canon, while also commenting on gendered patterns of consumerism and the fetishisation of fashion.