The exhibition Sculpture Nails sheds light on Sylvie Fleury’s profound contribution to contemporary conceptions of the sculptural medium. On the ground floor of the gallery, the Swiss artist presents a selection of sculptures – both historic pieces and new works seen here for the first time – spanning her career of more than 30 years. On the first floor, visitors discover an immersive space illuminated solely by the glow of the artist’s celebrated neon works. Across diverse bodies of work, Sculpture Nails plunges visitors into Sylvie Fleury’s unique sculptural world, inviting them into the margin between a celebration of life and things and a contemplation of consumer society’s darker underbelly.
Watch a video of the artist discussing the exhibition.
This futuristic sense is heightened by the imposing First Spaceship on Venus (Beyond Polish) sculpture from 2022, which draws inspiration from an East German science-fiction film of the 1960s entitled The Silent Star (First Spaceship on Venus). In this work, Fleury playfully subverts the masculinist realm of space conquest. The work’s title evokes Venusian symbolism around essentialist notions of femininity, as popularised by John Gray’s book Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus (1992). Fleury lacquers the spacecraft with bright pink metallic car paint, destabilising its stereotypical gender associations.
Sylvie Fleury intersperses her works with art-historical references, as exemplified by The Black Shiny Vinyl Raincoat (2024), which evokes postmodern artist Robert Gober’s severed legs, uncannily protruding from the wall. Departing from Gober’s hyperrealist limbs covered in human hair, Fleury’s legs are perfectly smooth and gleam with chameleon car paint. The artist drapes a coat by the Italian luxury fashion brand Moschino over the seductively crossed legs, embedding her work in the lineage of the readymade.
In this monumental new diptych, Fleury transfers a still from her 1995 video work Beauty Case onto a mirrored ground in a nod to Arte Povera artist Michelangelo Pistoletto’s celebrated Mirror Paintings. The image depicts Fleury as she bends into the boot of her 1967 Buick Skylark, struggling to retrieve her beauty case. This work ties into the artist’s investigation of the gender dynamics underpinning automobile culture. Drawing on the codes of female representation in popular imagery, Fleury depicts herself dismembered, her head and upper body disappearing into the boot to reveal only her rear side in a vibrant orange gown and high heels – signifiers of normative femininity. In curator Lucrezia Calabrò Visconti’s words, Fleury sheds light on ‘the overlap between the automotive fetish and the objectification of the female body,’ which she playfully re-appropriates and thereby disrupts.
Tapis Yoga Gucci is also a self-referential gesture to Carl Andre’s Copper Cardinals and her own subversion of the series in the earlier video work Walking on Carl Andre (1997), which shot women’s legs as they strutted atop the conceptual artist’s sculptures in bright red stilettos. In Fleury’s own words, ‘because I was a woman and a bit of a punk feminist in disguise, I wanted to appropriate the formal aspects of art and inject them with luxury and lipgloss. [...] I wanted to walk all over Carl Andre with the most exquisite high heels of the season.’ Formally echoing Andre’s rows of flat metal plates, Tapis Yoga Gucci further ‘feminises’ his oeuvre, wittily highlighting the masculinism underpinning the art-historical canon.
The new work Brume d’Or (2024) constitutes another ‘tenderly irreverent’ reference to Carl Andre’s Plain sculptures. While Andre employed raw industrial materials as a form of readymade, Fleury uses the sculptor’s very work as a readymade. She places a broken Chanel compact atop the assembled aluminium sheets, its mirror shattered and powder scattered across the metal surface. Destruction runs as a central theme through Sylvie Fleury’s practice, enabling her to play with and unsettle symbols of femininity.
Fleury’s work unfolds between two poles that are generally thought to be opposites: art and fashion – with fashion always implying luxury, gloss and glamour as well – which she relates to one another in complex ways, not least by creating a persona for herself as a female “fashion victim’’.
— Prof. Dr. Maria Muhle
Minimalist influences further coalesce in this sculpture from 2014, in which Sylvie Fleury appropriates a stepper from Jane Fonda’s Workout video series. The artist began grappling with the exercise industry in her 1992 video installation Lean Routine or How to Lose 30 Pounds in Under 3 weeks in which stacked CRT monitors played 1980s fitness clips starring female celebrities. Crystallising Fleury’s interest in the performance of beautification rituals as Foucauldian ‘technologies of the self’ in the pursuit of desirability, this sculpture ties into the artist’s whimsical critique of the sexism underpinning consumer capitalism.
For the first time in Sylvie Fleury’s career, the exhibition dedicates a space exclusively to her neon works on the second floor of the gallery, which span two decades of her investigation of the medium. These works hark back to Dan Flavin’s Minimalist sculptures made out of commercially available fluorescent light fixtures, as well as Joseph Kosuth’s neon works and underpinning principle that ‘art is making meaning.’ Investigating the intrinsic links between art and language, Fleury draws slogans from advertising to challenge their related ideals and aspirations, interrogating the tropes of contemporary consumerism through its own definitive strategies.
— Jeppe Ugelvig, curator
