Overview
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. 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.
