Sylvie Fleury valuation
Geneva artist of luxury shopping bags, make-up palettes, fur, rockets and racing cars, recast as art.
Sylvie Fleury was born in Geneva in 1961 and lives and works there.
What a work by Sylvie Fleury is worth
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Bio
Sylvie Fleury was born in Geneva in 1961 and lives and works there. As a young woman she worked as an au pair in New York, where she fell in with students making short films and studied photography, and in 1990 she became assistant to the Geneva artist John Armleder. Her first exhibition, in 1991, was Shopping Bags: the bags from a spree in luxury boutiques, still full, set out on the gallery floor. Since then her work has turned the objects of desire into readymades, in sculpture, installation, painting, neon and video: cosmetics and make-up palettes enlarged into paintings, designer shoes and handbags cast in metal, fake fur, magazine covers, Formula 1 cars and rockets, and borrowings from Mondrian, Minimalism and Pop. The cars and rockets, emblems of masculine power, are reclaimed through glossy colour and fur; she has described her method as customisation rather than appropriation. She received the Prix Meret Oppenheim in 2018.
Her output is large and varied, from unique installations to editions and multiples, so the edition size, the certificate and the date matter for each piece. Fur and fabric attract dust and fade, chrome and lacquered surfaces scratch, and neons need their transformers in working order and safely wired. Works made from real products, shopping bags and cosmetics among them, can be fragile and should be complete. Thaddaeus Ropac represents her.
Geneva, Villa Magica and Shopping Bags
With Armleder and his son she founded the record label Villa Magica Records in Geneva in 2004.
Solo exhibitions include MAMCO in Geneva in 2008, the Bass Museum in Miami in 2015 and 2017, the Villa Stuck in Munich in 2016 and the Istituto Svizzero in Rome in 2019.
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