Swiss artist Sylvie Fleury has been establishing a strategic field for her creative work since the early 1990s – somewhere between Appropriation Art and the ready-made, between an interpretative assimilation of art history and transformation of the everyday world of commodities. Whether she shows a strange collection of designer shoes with their matching boxes, enigmatically responds to Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes with Slim-Fast boxes or founds a women’s Automobile Club – she interweaves her criticism of institutions and her comments on fetishizing commodities. Fleury’s is a feminist criticism of both societal rules and the art market.

The sculpture shown at art berlin contemporary is a round metal surface in polished steel, resting theatrically in the center of the space as the clatter of high heels sounds from loudspeakers. In their sublime reduction, the reference to Carl Andre’s Minimalist floor works cannot be overlooked. Yet Fleury departs from and comments upon these already art-historically canonized sculptures with a kind of distracting, disturbing noise. There can hardly be a greater contrast: the undisturbed and predictable form ironically confronts a feminine-coded sound of human movement. In the sculpture’s fey world, the feminine emerges as a stereotype of unpredictability. The intervention makes fun of itself as much as it ironically comments on contemporary art history – and is, perhaps, a feminine take on the most recent art history. Thus, the lack of equality in sexual politics is called into question and a demand for change is articulated. This is also an appeal against the rigid ideological attributions of the most recent art history, whether formulated by the pro- or anti-feminist faction.

Born in 1961 in Geneva, Sylvie Fleury still resides in her birthplace. As an orchestrator of glamour, fashion, and the luxury items stemming from the modern world of consumerism, she makes comments on shiny illusions.