Swiss artist Sylvie Fleury doesn't take anything too seriously. But she is, in fact, quite serious. She brazenly makes art that addresses shopping, extra-terrestrials, and New Age thinking. Sylvie has a sense of humor. She's fearless. In Europe, you regularly see her work in newspapers and magazines. It creates glamorous provocations, like the time she showed a hundred bottles of Egoïste perfume in little Chanel bags on a table at the Cologne Art Fair in 1991. Every one of them was pinched on the very first night. Sylvie's show was stolen.



PETER: You just had a show of your new work at Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery in Paris. Did a lot of people come to the opening?
SYLVIE:Uff. There were a lot of friends there, because I hadn’t had a show in Paris for a long time. Unfortunately, I don’t quite remember who came, because I had been working on the project non-stop, day and night, before the opening. That evening I was so tired — maybe I drank too much or something. [laughs]

PETER: The first time I saw your work was in New York in 1992, when you showed shopping bags on the floor at Postmasters gallery. I hadn’t met you yet, but when I walked into that space I was blown away.
SYLVIE: Someone introduced us and you said, “This is very spooky, what you’re doing.” [laughs] I remember it exactly.

PETER: Well, it was spooky. I mean, formally the pieces had so much presence — and you had made so many interesting decisions about which shopping bags to use. You were one of the first people to look at fashion branding, and how that relates to the art world.
SYLVIE: I wouldn’t say I was one of the first. There are many artists who did that — Andy Warhol, for instance. But maybe I happened to capture that feeling for a new generation.

PETER: My idea is that some time in the ’70s, people in international fashion began to look at how artists were treated in the media. People like Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, and Giorgio Armani began, through photography, advertising, and the manipulation of images, to sort of brand themselves as artists. I don’t think Warhol ever addressed that.
SYLVIE: No. And you’re right, that was part of my interest. But I was just following my intuition — I could never quite say why I did the shopping bags. I was shopping a lot in those days, and I felt that it was relevant.

PETER: Were you thinking about the idea of the readymade?
SYLVIE: Yes, but the readymade had been done so much already. There was no point in just redoing a readymade. I liked the idea that the work could be completely superficial. There was also the idea of seduction, the idea of brands, names, labels, and all this stuff that was very present in the late ’80s. I also liked that the work was abstract, in that when you looked at the shopping bags, their contents were hidden and you couldn’t quite know what was in them.