‘Just be radical’: the feminist artist giving Matisse a modern punk twist

In her irreverent new exhibition, Sylvie Fleury is pairing the great modernist’s drawings and cutouts with her own fashion-focused workWhen Henri Matisse described his work as “in step with the future”, he was thinking about his revolutionary cutouts, made with collaged coloured paper, rather than, say, the evolution of the women’s movement or consumer culture. The leading Swiss artist Sylvie Fleury came of age with the latter, but when she was invited to select drawings and cutouts from the Matisse estate for an exhibition, she was struck by the enduring immediacy of his vision. “My feeling with modernist artists is that, a lot of the time, they were trying to define what was happening within the history of art,” she says preparing for Drawing on Matisse, her showwhich situating 16 of his works within and alongside her impishly feminist and fashion-focused sculpture. “With Matisse, it was more like: ‘Just do it, be radical.’”Fleury well understands the power of disruption. Her first work was a clutch of designer store bags full of high-end merch, which she dropped in the middle of a group exhibition in 1991. Fashion, that frivolous and feminine pursuit, was a luxury commodity but, she seemed to ask, was the art that surrounded it so different? Her work since has included canvases coated in pink fake fur, glittered rockets and a video of female bikers shooting guns at Chanel handbags. In previous projects laying bare art’s tacitly gendered aesthetics, she has feminised the macho minimalist visions of Carl Andre and Donald Judd, imagining an Andre-esque floor sculpture as a runway for women parading in stilettos, or riffing on Judd’s unadorned wall-mounted boxes by adding what look like blobs of shiny metallic melted flesh. Continue reading...

W hen Henri Matisse described his work as “in step with the future”, he was thinking about his revolutionary cutouts, made with collaged coloured paper, rather than, say, the evolution of the women’s movement or consumer culture. The leading Swiss artist Sylvie Fleury came of age with the latter, but when she was invited to select drawings and cutouts from the Matisse estate for an exhibition, she was struck by the enduring immediacy of his vision. “My feeling with modernist artists is that, a lot of the time, they were trying to define what was happening within the history of art,” she says preparing for Drawing on Matisse, her showwhich situating 16 of his works within and alongside her impishly feminist and fashion-focused sculpture.

“With Matisse, it was more like: ‘Just do it, be radical.’” Fleury well understands the power of disruption. Her first work was a clutch of designer store bags full of high-end merch, which she dropped in the middle of a group exhibition in 1991.

Fashion, that frivolous and feminine pursuit, was a luxury commodity but, she seemed to ask, was the art that surrounded it so different? Her work since has included canvases coated in pink fake fur, glittered rockets and a video of female bikers shooting guns at Chanel handbags. In previous projects laying bare art’s tacitly gendered aesthetics, she has feminised the macho minimalist visions of Carl Andre and Donald Judd, imagining an Andre-esque floor sculpture as a runway for wo.