Sylvie Fleury (*1961) is a contemporary Swiss artist whose installation, sculpture, and mixed media work deals with our sentimental and aesthetic attachments to consumerist culture. Emerging in the 1990s, Fleury’s early “shopping bag” installations laid the foundations for a body of work that became as provocative as it is playful. Fleury heralded a new artistic trend by subverting the codes of consumption, creating an interplay between fashion and art, while interrogating the relationship between desire and fetishism.
Courtesy of the artist
Sylvie Fleury
Soft Rocket (2026)
TEXTE ZUR KUNST Artists’ Edition
March 2026
Since the early 1990s, Sylvie Fleury has explored luxury objects and consumer culture, often defamiliarized in scale or material, highlighting desire, value, and gendered expectations. In her second TEXTE ZUR KUNST edition, she turns to the space rocket, a fetishized object with a different logic. Beginning with First Spaceship on Venus (1996), Fleury subverted conquest narratives using glittery pink lacquer and soft fur. Her Soft Rocket series contrasts futurist ambition with vulnerability, drawing on soft sculpture traditions, playfully critiquing masculine progress while imagining alternative utopias beyond Earth.
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