lunedì 18 maggio 2015

SYLVIE FLEURY: C'EST LA VIE! - GALERIE VAN GELDER, AMSTERDAM




SYLVIE FLEURY
C'EST LA VIE!
Galerie van Gelder
Planciusstraat 9 A - Amsterdam
19/5/2015 - 27/6/2015

Many women see their latest purchases as showpieces. This also applies to Sylvie Fleury. However, in her case she shows off her treasures in a different way, by turning them into art pieces. Shopping like that in the context of art is adds an extra dimension to the excitement of buying fashionable commodity goods.
Where as shopping is being instantly associated with women, certain terms are also directly linked to men as well. Fleury wants to bring an end to these typical male associations. This becomes visible in her work Formula 1 Dress for example, the male Formule 1 race equipment is sissified by Fleury and transformed into half-dress, half-overall.
The performance C’est la vie! which she performed in 2013 was once again a transformation, with a touch of established fashion, doing shoppings and relaxation. Atired in the outfit of Mondrian-dresses of the designer Yves Saint Laurent, five female models accompanied by lapdogs entered the shoppingmall Hoog Catharijne in Utrecht. The models, looking as sixties clichés, came to the mall for their leisure, namely shopping and walking the dogs. The parading and the shopping in this performance gave the Mondriaan-designs of Yves Saint Laurent an extra feminist twist. In 2015 this performance was released as a movie and can now be seen at Galerie van Gelder accompanied by the almost extraterrestrial music of Joe Meek & The Blue Boys from 1960.

Sylvie Fleury (1961) works and lives in Geneva, Switzerland. In 1992 she had her first solo exhibition in the Netherlands at Galerie van Gelder. With the exhibition ‘The Art of Survival’ in the Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum in 1993 she had her major breakthrough. She also had exhibitions in Villa Merkel in Esslingen, Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Zurich, Mamco in Geneva and the CAC in Málaga, Spain. Artworks of Sylvie Fleury are currently shown at Maison Particulière, Brussels, Museum Tinguely, Basel and the Daimler Art Collection in Stuttgart.

Image: Sylvie Fleury