Sylvie Fleury | My Life on the Road | Museum Villa Stuck

A Museum Villa Stuck Exhibition
Curated by Verena Hein

Faster! Bigger! Better! Since the 1990s Sylvie Fleury has in various ways been referencing commerce and the world of luxury goods in her works. This summer the Museum Villa Stuck is devoting a major one-woman exhibition to her. Fleury will use the historical rooms of the Museum Villa Stuck to offer a survey of her work of the past 25 years. In addition, she is conceiving new works for the Stuck villa; a glass piece created in collaboration with the Mayer’sche Hofkunstanstalt will be a special highlight.

Sylvie Fleury is known for her stagings of glamor, fashion and luxury items: shopping bags of well-known fashion companies are presented in the exhibition spaces, as are cosmetic products that are lying broken on the floor. Status symbols and fetishes from the world of consumption are transferred into the context of the world of art, thereby calling their value into question. Her objects are “ready-mades” in the tradition of Duchamp that underscore Wahrhol’s approach to a critique of the world of commodities.  The power of the brand, the logo as emblem of a global consumer world — Fleury exaggerates these marketing strategies in her multilayered works.  Neon signs announce messages of the fashion industry: “Envy” quotes a well-known perfume, combining the ephemerality of a scent and its advertising into a paradox. Fleury takes works of famous (male) artists, such as the art of Minimalist Dan Flavin or the conceptual works of Daniel Buren, and adds provokingly feminist connotations to them. By disrupting the aesthetic concept of those works, she breaks their seriousness.

For her exhibition at the Museum Villa Stuck Sylvie Fleury will also make reference to Franz von Stuck’s historical function rooms. Like no other in his day, Stuck knew how to create a brand: from his own typeface through to the total work of art, as which he conceived his mansion, he was primarily concerned with recognizability and brilliant art product development — a challenge for Fleury’s works. Her installations oscillate between seduction and superficiality, art and advertising, concept and consumption. They reveal desire and expert or insider knowledge as well as social codes.

Sylvie Fleury lives and works in Geneva where she was born in 1961. Since 1991 she has been showing her work in numerous exhibitions, including solo presentations at the Centre de Arte Contemporaneo in Malaga (2011); at the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Genéve in Geneva (2008); and at the Kunsthalle Wien (2006). She is the recipient of the prestigious “2015 Geneva Société des Arts Prize.” In Munich, Fleury’s work was most recently on view at the Kubus of the Lenbachhaus in 2010. In 1999 she was included in the group show “Wall Works” at the Museum Villa Stuck.

A bilingual catalogue (in German and English) is published in conjunction with the exhibition.

Museum Villa Stuck
Prinzregentenstraße 60
D- 81675 München
www.villastuck.de