Biography of Sylvie Fleury
Sylvie Fleury is a contemporary Swiss artist known for her multimedia installations, mixed media works and sculptural objects. Following in the tradition of conceptual and appropriation artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol, she creates works that comment on the superficiality of consumer culture and the fetish of the object by borrowing imagery and items from everyday life. Sylvie Fleury through appropriation ultimately aims to examine how consumption influences and controls our identity.
Sylvie Fleury often exploits elements of fashion in her work, using its formal principles and the highly recognizable “images” created by the fashion industry. She does this without explicitly taking a critical position towards the mechanisms of the market or of consumption. Employing artistic means, the artist investigates the aesthetics and phenomena of fashion—freeing their conceptual aspects from their transitory nature so they become blueprints for thinking. In her wall paintings, Sylvie Fleury abstains from using figurative pictures and restricts herself to using typography and color combinations—visual phenomena quoted from fashion—which give rise to connections with images in the viewer’s mind.
Sylvie Fleury was born 1961 in Geneva, Switzerland, where she continues to live and work. Solo exhibitions of her work have been held at Galerie Mehdi Chouakri in Berlin, Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Pantin, France. Her work was exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1993 and can be found in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, and the Museum der Moderne in Salzburg. Sylvie Fleury has also published a number of books which have been featured internationally.
