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by Simon Baier (Author), Sylvie Fleury (Author), Konrad Bitterli (Editor)
If ever an art ¬ museum is transformed into a fashion show, then Sylvie Fleury definitely is the guest. For around twenty-five years, the artist has wittily ¬ explored gender cliché s and the stereotypes of consumer society. Kunst Museum Winterthur is presenting Shoplifters from Venus , the first ¬ comprehensive solo exhibition of the Geneva artist in Switzerland in fifteen years, in which she seeks a dialogue with modernism while revealing its masculine character with great relish. This forthcoming book is more than just an exhibition catalogue: it follows the development of the artist's work on the basis of all her solo exhibi¬ tions since the 1990s. Essays by Simon Baier, Konrad Bitterli, and Elisabeth Bronfen illuminate ¬ selected aspects of her work, which over the years has lost little of its contentious poignancy and emancipatory power.
Author Biography
Simon Baier is Laurenz-Professor for Contemporary Art at the University of Basel. He studied Art History and Philosophy in Heidelberg, Karlsruhe and New York and completed his PhD at the University of Zurich with a thesis on El Lissitzky's and Kazimir Malevich's work around 1928. Simon Baier also works as an art critic. His texts appeared in Artforum International and Texte zur Kunst. From 2005- 2006 he was a fellow for Critical Studies, Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Sylvie Fleury (*1961) is a contemporary Swiss artist whose installation, sculpture, and mixed media work deals with our sentimental and aesthetic attachments to consumerist culture. Emerging in the 1990s, Fleury's early » shopping bag« installations laid the foundations for a body of work that became as provocative as it is playful. Fleury heralded a new artistic trend by subverting the codes of consumption, creating an interplay between fashion and art, while interrogating the relationship between desire and fetishism. 2018 she was awarded with the Prix Meret Oppenheim. Konrad Bitterli (b. 1960) former curator of Kunstmuseum St. Gallen is since 2017 the new director of the Kunst Museum Winterthur and follows Dieter Schwarz in this directorate. Schwarz was an expert of art of the 1960s with worldwide high renown. The main focus in his work sees Konrad Bitterli in an intensive communication of art to the general public and wants to continue comparitive works as did shown with the exhibitions » Hodler- Giacometti, Daumier- Pettibon«, or about the work of so different artists as alike Roman Signer, Steven Parino, Jonathan Lasker, Donald Judd, Mona Hartoum et al. Elisabeth Bronfen is Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Zurich and, since 2007, Global Distinguished Professor at New York University. Her research focuses on the visual culture of the 19th and 20th century, on intermediality and Gender Studies. She did her PhD at the University of Munich, on literary space in the work of Dorothy M. Richardson's novel » Pilgrimage«, as well as her habilitation, five years later, on representations of femininity and death. She held numerous guest professorships in the US, Australia, Portugal, France, Italy, and Denkmark. David Schmidhauser is a curator at Kunst Museum Winterthur.
