Sylvie Fleury, born in Geneva in 1961, gained recognition for her sophisticated presentations of glamour, fashion, and lifestyle, notably through her Shopping Bags series that gained attention in the 1990s. Each bag, including those from renowned global brands, contained the object that the artist had purchased with it. The unabashed combination of art and commerce seemed scandalous. Even more intriguing was the fact that an artist dedicated herself to almost obsessive shopping for luxury goods, seemingly indulging in glamour and lifestyle without critique. However, the exchange between esteemed archival culture and everyday spaces has a longstanding tradition in the visual arts since Marcel Duchamp.
Sylvie Fleury consistently incorporates this tradition while deconstructing traditional gender stereotypes, doing so with a playful irony. For instance, she has models in high heels walk across Carl Andre's floor plates. Her artistic practice, spanning sculpture, performance, installation, and painting, employs strategies associated with early Conceptualism, Pop Art, and Minimalism, offering a critical perspective on the predominantly male-dominated history of art.
Since her first institutional solo exhibition at the Migros Museum in Zurich in 1998, Sylvie Fleury's work has received widespread international recognition. She has had numerous solo exhibitions, including shows at the Center for Art and Media (ZKM) and Le Magasin, Centre National d'Art Contemporain in Grenoble in 2001, the Schinkel Pavillon in Berlin in 2007, and Villa Stuck in Munich in 2016. In 2018, she was honored with the Swiss Grand Prix Art/Prix Meret Oppenheim.
For the first time in over fifteen years, the Kunst Museum Winterthur is hosting a comprehensive solo exhibition of Sylvie Fleury's work in Switzerland. Alongside iconic pieces, the exhibition will feature new works specifically created for this retrospective, offering insight into the diverse and consistently evolving body of work by one of the country's most significant artists.
