Sylvie Fleury - An obsessive passion for collecting begins with the Red Cross
Sylvie Fleury was born in Geneva on 24th June 1961. She came to New York as an au pair in the 1980s where she joined a group of students working on short films, attended the Germain School of Photography, and had the opportunity to work for a day as an assistant to the Old Master of photography, Richard Avedon. Fleury then travelled to India, where she learned the classical Bharatanatyam dance, returned to Geneva in Switzerland, and worked for the Red Cross for a time. She developed a rather idiosyncratic passion for collecting: under the pseudonym Silda von Braun, she collected everything labelled with a red cross - including the complete interior of a dental practice, which she used to transform her own flat into a dentist's cabinet. In 1990, Fleury met the Geneva performance artist John Armleder and initially became his assistant. Together they moved into Villa Magica, a large old house on the outskirts of Geneva, where the artist now lives alone and has enough space to fulfil her passion for collecting.
A makeshift solution becomes a star of the art world
Sylvie Fleury laid the foundations for her international career in the 1990s when she stood in for Christian Floquet - who had cancelled at short notice - at a planned joint exhibition with her artist friend John Armleder and his colleague Olivier Mosset. Without further ado, she put together a selection of luxury shopping bags to create an installation, which she named C'est la vie in reference to a perfume by Christian Lacroix, and placed it between Armleder's and Mosset's paintings. She became a star of the international art scene overnight: the glittering consumer world with all its promises, by which Fleury herself likes to be seduced time and again and with which she has a kind of love-hate relationship, becomes the centre of her artistic work in a fascinating and blurred interplay of homage and persiflage. Behind the mirror-smooth polished surface of her objects lies an abyss of ambiguity, the interpretation of which is also difficult because Sylvie Fleury denies any help in the form of commentaries or explanatory text panels.
A feminist approach with ambiguous provocations
Sylvie Fleury is a master of ambiguity who, despite her seemingly classically feminine interest in beauty products, pursues a feminist approach and does not shy away from icons of (male) art history: she quotes works by Marcel Duchamp, Piet Mondrian and Andy Warhol and unabashedly alienates them with plush shreds and Diet Coke, whilst elegantly dressed models fire machine guns at Chanel handbags. Fleury is also passionate about fast cars, especially large and lowered ‘Amish cars’. Fleury is also a musician, and her own record label Villa Magica Records, which she runs with Armleder and his son Stéphane, has released CDs and LPs with songs by Fleury herself, but also by artists such as Gerwald Rockenschaub.
Sylvie Fleury has received prizes and awards for her art, was nominated for the Geneva Prix de la Société des Arts, and in 2018 was awarded the Prix Meret Oppenheim.
Sylvie Fleury - Works that have already been sold at Kunsthaus Lempertz:
