Sylvie Fleury: Frankie Goes To Hollywood

Karma International in Zurich presents an exhibition dedicated to the works of Sylvie Fleury. Subversively taking on capitalist aesthetics through a distinctly feminized lense, her work examines the intersection of popular and high culture. The commodification of beauty and wellness are rendered in slick, highly produced objects d’art with human-scale makeup palettes and neon signs expressing state of the art aphorisms appropriated from perfume brands.

After shopping one day, Fleury stopped into an art gallery and when she set her armful of bags on the floor and claimed them as sculpture. From thereon she began her exploration of the ready made, often in the form of a crossover between fashion and art such as other nontraditional mediums like motorcycles and vinyl banners long before the more recent trend towards collaborations with brands.

As she also employs a world of atypical textures like faux-fur, she directly confronts the art historical precedent of monochromatic painted squares for which male artists in the 20th century were glorified. Fleury looks at the marketization of the art world while challenging the space of the gallery and the very process of consuming art.