SYLVIE FLEURY, Cuddly Painting, 1992
In 1992 Sylvie Fleury had her first solo exhibition at Galerie van Gelder. Visitors who came to the gallery told me in shock that the work on display was not art, but that it was about fashion. That was strange to hear, because my enthusiasm and fascination was strongly driven by something I had never seen before and that looked very intensely lived through. This artist creates work that truly comes from what she loves; shopping and browsing fashion magazines like artists browse art magazines. I went to the Albert Cuyp market with her to buy various kinds of artificial fur. In the gallery George Korsmit passed by to help us out. He was kind enough to stretch all the purchased fabrics for her, and me. I saw that she was not standing next to her work, but in the middle of it. What she makes is what she is. That is particularly attractive.
The enormous orange-yellow cloth, the fabric of which is designed as a kind of coup-de-soleil hairstyle, is unique within her oeuvre. Fleury has not incorporated this colour pattern in any other canvas since.
'The fascination her work commands is due in large measure to the irritating confusion—deliberately iconoclastic—it arouses between art and fashion' says Pierre-André Lienhard (curator and Head of the Musée d'Art et l'Histoire de la Ville, Geneva) ten years later in 2002.