27 November 2018 – 5 January 2019

Thaddaeus Ropac presented an exhibition of new works by Sylvie Fleury that delved into the tradition of the ready-made and borrowing visual elements from Pop and Minimal art. In this new series the artist further explored the codes of femininity and masculinity and those of art and fashion in the light of contemporary consumerism. With her monumental makeup palettes, Fleury questioned the structures of desire and power attached to cosmetic objects and investigates the grey areas of a genre often considered as a hybrid between painting and sculpture: the shaped canvas.

A self-proclaimed feminist, her new paintings were intended as a feminist counterpoint to this pictorial genre. The minimal language, which here translated into the repetition of the same elements, the reduction of forms and the use of industrial materials, was in line with the practice initiated by her male predecessors, a painting that celebrated tensions between internal structure and general form, between flatness and three-dimensionality.