Sylvie Fleury on view at the Museum der Moderne in Salzburg with a glamorous ‘pop-up intervention’
Be it a cast of Jane Fonda’s step machine from the 1970s, massive bronze stilettos, or a monumental pink popcorn—Sylvie Fleury’s works are sure to catch attention.
But the sparkling surface belies considerable depths: the Swiss artist undertakes probing analytical studies of our consumer culture. Harnessing humor, exaggeration, and a pinch of provocation, she raises questions like: Why do we desire certain things? How do consumer goods become fetishes? Why do we want to anchor our identities in objects? And why do we attribute such outsize—almost supernatural—meaning to them? Fleury’s works expose the mechanisms at work in glamour and the world of brand products.
In the encounter with the existing exhibition, the intervention charts a fresh set of dynamic interactions: Fleury’s works enter into a subtle dialogue with the art around them—about time and the waxing and waning of aesthetic phenomena.
Across three gallery rooms, Nika Neelova sets out a world of her own in which past, present, and future blend into one another in poetic ways. Working with found objects and mundane materials like wood, glass, or rock fragments, she fashions sculptures and installations that would seem to be the remnants of a distant past or speculative future. Her works tell stories of people and places that have long vanished from existence—or perhaps never existed at all—and invite the beholder to rethink the idea of time. In Cascade, Neelova interweaves her own works with archaeological treasures on loan from other institutions and objects from the collections by numerous artists including Isa Genzken, Heinz Frank, and Maria Bartuszová. A multilayered narrative unfolds, limning the vision of a utopian world.
In this setting, Fleury’s works strike the eye as deliberate disruptions yet turn out to tie in with the narrative in surprising ways. In light of Neelova’s vision of a possible future, Fleury’s works may be read as prophesying a world without humankind. Inflated and stridently colorful, her objects come across as bizarre relics from another era.
