In No Man’s Time (2023), the Swiss artist revisits her first artwork from a series of celebrated installations comprising assortments of luxury shopping bags arranged on the floor. Here, a mirror displaying a photo-silkscreened image of Fleury positioning her early work while dressed head to toe in Alaïa is presented alongside three further branded bag sculptures from the 1990s. The work is titled after the exhibition it was first shown in and also references Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Mirror Paintings. Pistoletto, one of the main proponents of Arte Povera, establishes an active relationship between the viewer’s reflection and the artwork’s figure, thereby creating a portal between art and life. Similarly, Fleury’s reflective plane invites viewers into the work to experience reality, image, time and space collapsing within it.

“In 1973 there was one of the biggest oil crises, and everyone who had American cars with big engines sold them. They were almost worthless. When I was eighteen I had 500 francs to buy a car. There was a red ’68 Camaro which cost 500 francs and which I took straight away. I fell in love.” —Sylvie Fleury

Frankie Goes to Hollywood, the series of monochromatic hard-edge paintings that echo Frank Stella’s works, consist of meticulously applied layers of acrylic paint mixed with small metallic specks, giving the pieces a tactile and unexpected sensual quality. Together these works explore the synonymy between objects of desire and art.

The investigation into the creation of endless, insatiable desire is a throughline in the artist’s boundary-pushing career. Drawing from the fields of fashion, pop culture, car racing, cinema and science fiction, she has created an alluring and deceptively straightforward visual vocabulary with which she constructs surprising narratives.

Interested in paraphernalia (originally a legal term that denotes a married woman’s property besides her dowry) that is dismissed as being superficial precisely because of its female connotations, Fleury twists the implied gendered rituals and obsessions, asking audiences to think critically about the world’s design.

First Spaceship on Venus is a series that delves into the imagery around science fiction and outer space, questioning its machismo. Creating rockets in a range of media, Fleury satirizes their phallic symbolism by employing colors and materials associated with “femininity.”

Oscillating between fascination and distancing, sympathy and criticism, Fleury’s works leave viewers constantly re-evaluating what they are seeing. Both indulging and subverting the modes of power of consumer culture, the works scratch at the superficial to construct a complex and unique reflection on not only the art world but also present-day society.

Please find more works presented in the exhibition here.