Sylvie Fleury at the Pinacoteca Agnelli Laura McLean-Ferris gives an insight of the show “Turn Me On", . (This link opens in a new tab).
By Laura McLean-Ferris
(...) Today’s Pinacoteca is something new - a feminist organization run entirely by women and animated by a desire to treat the site as a palimpsest of twentieth-century themes, among them: men of industry, labor and the production line, patriarchy, automotive and broader technological developments, and the modernist movements represented in the Agnelli collection.
(...) A new contemporary exhibitions space has also opened, inaugurated by a Sylvie Fleury survey - the artist’s spiky and glamorously critical approach to drives and fetishes being wholly appropriate for this new endeavor - as well as La Pista 500, a new sculpture park on the rooftop test track, whose premiere features Fleury and Valie Export, Mark Leckey, Cally Spooner, Shilpa Gupta, and Louise Lawler.
(...) I first visited Fleury’s exhibition, “Turn Me On,” on the lower floor, which opened with a collection of television sets in the entryway playing 1980s and ’90s exercise videos such as Cher’s Body Confidence (1992) and Jane Fonda’s Easy Going Workout (1985), which in the context seemed to suggest machinelike tune-ups for hot ladies, as well as a stack of white boxes from luxury brands in ascending sizes entitled Monochrome, 2021. (The artist Davide Stucchi pointed out to me that the bottommost box was from a pair of shoes by The Row, a surprise, since Fleury, who was walking around in head-to-toe Balenciaga—a black tracksuit by day and newsprint dress by night—is not known for her pared-down style.) Here and throughout, Fleury gleefully charges art with the spirit of commerce, flattening the gendered relationship between the museum vitrine and the point-of-sale display in the boutique: both exclusive, both expensive, both needful of theatrical support props. Nickel-plated Balenciaga Knife Pumps and gilded Gucci handcuffs gleam on plinths. Fleury plays a merry saboteuse in this exhibition—she walks on Carl Andre floors in high heels, scratches and dents panels coated in car paint, and modifies the yellow stripes of an installation made in Daniel Buren’s signature motif as though the rayures were prison bars that she has pulled apart, creating an ovoid escape hole. Her “First Spaceship on Venus” sculptures from 1999 are soft stuffed rockets, here slumped together in a timely sendup of the facile machismo of Muskian Mars missions. (...)
