Sylvie Fleury

Sylvie Fleury

February 1th –
February 15th, 2012
Gstaad
  • Sylvie Fleury
    Untitled,2008
    Oil on canvas
    100 x 100 cm
  • Sylvie Fleury
    Crash tests (4),2010
    Car lacquer on steel (4)
    168 x 100 x 9 cm
  • Sylvie Fleury
    Miniskirts are black,2009
    Acrylic on canvas
    80 x 100 x 4 cm
  • Sylvie Fleury
    Friends,2010
    Shopping bags with content and white cuddly
    40 x 50 x 50 cm
  • Sylvie Fleury
    Barrel,2010
    Lacquered barrel
    90 x 60 x 60 cm
  • Sylvie Fleury
    Fall-Winter 2008,2010
    Dummy and painting
    175 x 60 x 60 cm
  • Sylvie Fleury
    Be good, be bad, just be,2010
    Lacquered barrels and neons
    (3) 90 x 60 x 60 cm

Patricia Low Contemporary is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Sylvie Fleury.

One of today’s most recognisable ‘art-brands’, Sylvie Fleury’s work fluently bridges art, fashion, and design. Spanning across a wide range of media – from painting, to sculpture, assemblage, photography and silk screen prints – to showcase some of her most renowned pieces, Fleury’s work flirts shamelessly with subversion, implicating macho-conquest and pop production as a distinctly female domain. Fleury’s subjects blur the everyday and the fantastical – from couture shopping, muscle cars, to nature’s psychotropic bounties – elevating kitsch to opulently luxurious spectacle (and vice versa).

Running throughout the exhibition are three of Fleury’s favourite subjects: gorgeous shoes, fast cars, and 1960s style-icon painting. A series of photographic stills from Fleury’s 2005 video Strange Fire pictures a pair of star-spangly stilettos reducing a sea of glass Christmas tree ornaments to precious-pretty rubble; the carnage of when beauty meets attitude is redoubled in her black marble Chanel Yeti Boots – accompanied by a requisite bronze cast Balenciaga handbag – the epitome of classicism v. well-heeled barbarity. Ash Plumes to the Iron Soul stages a pair of wellies perched atop a smoke filled crate flanked by fronds of feathers in primary hues, elevating statuesque portraiture, with all its parlour room repose, to new smouldering innuendo levels.

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Taking their cues from the worlds of fashion and advertising, her abstract and text-based canvases are as much about the exclusive macho codes of painting as the fixating allure of surface. Her lush Untitled splatter compositions, reminiscent of Pollock’s drizzles, explode in a barrage of Maybelline colours: set against black backgrounds, bursts of concealer beige and eye shadow blue decimate the boundaries between seduction and violence; while in other works, Daniel Buren and Lucio Fontana are each given makeovers: their pop abstractions appropriated and hilariously feminised (or more appropriately, vagazzled). With text paintings from her Miniskirts Are Back series – their fashionista manifesto typeset in horror movie script, emblazoned in cosmetic gloss sheen – Warhol-esque screen prints of Sweet and Low packages, and cuddly fake fur minimalist effigies, Fleury restages pop’s frivolous pose; un-ironically, uncannily levelling the symbolic brand values of beauty, the synthetic and abjection.

Four large canvases from her Flame series – which have become something of Fleury’s personal logo – set hotrod details ablaze in her signature pink. Following on this automotive theme, her steel panel Crash Tests replicate the format of colour field paintings; dented and warped, their candy hued gloss surfaces reframe modernist elegance as an impetus of seduction and collateral damage. Fleury’s man-eater trump, however, isn’t in hot and fast mechanics, but her oversized fairytale mushrooms: wonderfully trippy, weirdly futuristic, and utterly, erotically, scandalous, their holographic sheen belies a deceptive allure of surface, the very source of Fleury’s own-brand aphrodisiac.

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