Artists: Sylvie Fleury - Henri Matisse

Luxembourg + Co. presents Drawing on Matisse, an exhibition organised together with Sylvie Fleury at its London gallery. The exhibition presents the work of Fleury (b.1961) in response to a large body of original drawings and cut-outs by Henri Matisse (1869-1954) from the artist’s estate, including works that have not been shown publicly before.

Since the beginning of the 1990s, the work of Sylvie Fleury has been raising questions concerning taste, fashion, and desire in twentieth-century culture, and tackling art’s ever-growing status as commodity. Forming a significant part of her practice, Fleury repeatedly and strategically mimics, appropriates, and at times even embeds, the work of major historical artists into her own installations to this end. Such historical explorations are often executed as responses to the cultural and gendered legacy that artists such as Piet Mondrian, Jean Dubuffet, and Frank Stella, among others, have been part of, and/or drawn into in hindsight. Drawing on Matisse extends this trajectory in Sylvie Fleury’s work, but also emphasises the relevance of Henri Matisse’s legacy to the visual language of contemporary art and fashion, to the identity and body politics implicit in his work, and to his influence on Fleury’s practice more directly.

The exhibition includes mannequin body-part sculptures and wall-mounted works by Fleury alongside a large group of drawings by Matisse mounted on glass picture frames individually manufactured by the Swiss artisan glass sculptor Francoise Bolli under Fleury’s guidance. Mimicking sentimental domestic aesthetics typically associated with the 1950s, the glass-framed drawings incorporate partial reflections of the viewers’ complexion within the display.

Drawing on Matisse, as its title suggests, is the outcome of a delicate and commemorative act of defacement. It is at once an acknowledgement of the significant influence Matisse has held over Fleury’s evolution as an artist, and an appeal to abandon the canonical reading of his work. Her response to Matisse therefore intentionally exaggerates the stereotypic feminine aesthetics associated with his work and exposes a side of him that is surprisingly irreverent, provocative, and rebellious.

Fleury’s selection of works by Matisse for the project focuses on dismemberment and distortion of subjects, exposing strategies such as multiplication (of eyes, lips, hands, or patterns), fragmentation of body parts, and the collapse of background and fore into one. She also adopts Matisse’s characteristic lines, compositions, themes, and materials, into her own compositions, venturing a delicate stylistic exchange informed by a conceptual one.

Drawing on Matisse will be accompanied by a catalogue published by Walther und Franz Koenig Buchhandlung, including a conversation with the artist and a new essay by writer Adrian Rifkin.

Sylvie Fleury (b. in 1961, Geneva) has been an innovating and provocative force in the arts since her first exhibition, Vital Perfections, at Galerie Philomene Magers, Bonn, in 1991, where she exhibited constellations of fashion brands’ shopping bags on the gallery floor. Among her notable institutional exhibitions are Yes to All at Kunsthaus Rotterdam (2024); Shoplifters from Venus at the Kunst Museum Winterthur (2023); Sylvie Fleury at Kunstraum Dornbirn, Austria (2019); Chaussures Italiennes at the Istituto Svizzero, Rome (2019); My Life on the Road at Villa Stuck, Munich (2016); Eternity Now at the Bass Museum, Miami (2017); Sylvie Fleury at Centro de arte contemporaneo de Malága (2011); and Rendez-vous at MAMCO Genève (2008). In 2018 she was awarded Switzerland's Prix Meret Oppenheim and in 2015 received the Société des Arts de Genève Prize.