Sylvie Fleury Frieze London 2016

For the 2016 edition of Frieze London, Mehdi Chouakri, Salon 94, and Sprüth Magers are pleased to present Sylvie Fleury’s pioneering work A Journey to Fitness or How to Lose 30 Pounds In Under Three Weeks.

The installation was first shown in Aperto 1993 at the Venice Biennale. Restaging this piece points to its continued relevance and prescient examination of foundational art historical and sociopolitical issues. A Journey to Fitness will be installed in the 1990s section of Frieze London, curated by Nicolas Trembley.

The presentation will consist of a 12-channel installation, using original monitors from the 1980s and 1990s, all turned upside down and simultaneously playing different vintage workout videos featuring iconic models like Jane Fonda, Cindy Crawford and Raquel Welch. Fonda’s aerobic lessons in particular marked the beginning of the “democratization” of fitness culture in the 1980s, as well as the corresponding lifestyle and its unique fashion. Sylvie Fleury’s lifeless mass of cords and screens seems productively at odds with the physicality of an exercise video, which is reminiscent of the simultaneously bodily and technological conceptualisms of Nam June Paik. Also on view will be Sylvie Fleury’s wall painting Modulateur Ombres et Lumières, Welcome to the World of Chanel Beauty, that was also shown in 1993. It consists of three walls painted in different shades of eye-shadow according to the latest make-up trends. This concept of color block wall paintings was used for the first time by Le Corbusier. When combined with the aging monitors, there is a sense that everything, no matter how contemporary, decomposes into obsolescence.

Sylvie Fleury’s work is characterized by a post-modern obsession with representation and its role as the originator and moulder of desire. Both works allude to this aspect of lust within consumer culture.

Nevertheless she does not distance the images of seduction and objects of desire, but accepts the power of representation in the logo culture and their fascination. A Journey to Fitness... distills the artist’s interest in mass media and branding as essential (though perhaps, at times, unwanted elements) of identity formation.

“Fleury is much more interested in the content of the representation; in her criticism she does not adopt the perspective of a reactionary, containing and inhibiting ethics, but she criticizes “persuasive images“ as being nothing but images, and luxury articles as just vehicles. Fleury reminds her public of the utopian desires and hopes for a fulfilled life which popular culture promises and represents.“ — Peter Weibel, in: Sylvie Fleury. The Art of Survival, Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz, 1993.

Sylvie Fleury was born 1961 in Geneva, where she continues to work and live. Her works have been recently shown in solo shows at the Museum Villa Stuck in Munich (2016), the Bass Museum of Art, Miami (2015), CAC Centro de Arte Contemporaneo de Málaga, Malaga (2011), KUBUS des Lenbachhauses, Munich (2008), Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2006), Le Magasin - Centre National d’Art Contemporain, Grenoble (2000), Villa Merkel, Esslingen (1999), Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich (1998), Mamco Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Geneva (1996), and Le Consortium, Dijon (1994).