Sylvie Fleury’s multimedia practice explores the interplay between fashion and art, scrutinizing the politics of consumerism and fetishism. This interrogation is as provocative—radically questioning the paradigms of desire and art history—as it is playful. Continuing their collaboration of over three decades, Sprüth Magers is pleased to present She-Devils On Wheels , a solo exhibition of works by Fleury. The exhibition showcases the installation She-Devils on Wheels Headquarters (2000), along with a selection of neon works and both recent and historical sculptures.
She-Devils on Wheels Headquarters (2000) draws on a 1968 film about an all-female motorcycle gang, The Man-Eaters, and Fleury’s own women-only motoring club, founded in the 1990s after she was refused membership to a car-racing club. The installation includes a red mural with blocky lettering spelling “SHE-DEVILS ON WHEELS,” a large-scale neon reading “HOT HEELS,” blown-up magazine covers and club merchandise—badges, caps, stickers and T-shirts. The work establishes sharp parallels between the paraphernalia of femininity and the tools of motorsport culture, offering an ironic critique of gendered rituals and obsessions. The show’s neons transform commercial language—product names like “Égoïste,” advertising mantras like “Faster! Bigger! Better!”—into meditations on consumption. By isolating these familiar slogans, the artist exposes the mechanisms through which aspiration, luxury and identity are shaped and marketed in contemporary society. The choice of neon, a quintessential advertising medium, fuses art with commerce and language with sculpture.
Fleury extends this exploration of constructed allure and material culture in her sculptural works. In her ongoing series, luxury objects, such as shoes, handbags and perfume bottles, are cast in chromed bronze. The snakeskin Prada Boots (2003) bridge Duchamp’s concept of the readymade with Pop and Minimalist aesthetics, their seductive material and details suspending viewers between complicity in and critique of consumer culture. The sculpture Ford Cosworth (2000) converts the eight-cylinder engine designed by Ford and the British manufacturer Cosworth, known for being one of the most successful Formula One engines, into a polished object—part trophy, part relic. In Hubcaps (1997), twelve wheel covers from so-called muscle cars, a class of American-made high-power automobiles produced in the 1960s and ’70s, are arranged and hung in a grid pattern. By adopting strategies from Minimal Art, Fleury satirizes the intellectual hegemony of male-dominated art movements.
The artist’s site-specific mural Flames (1998/2025) covers an entire gallery wall with flickering flames, channeling the signature paint jobs of hot rod counterculture, where car customization became a symbol of individuality and rebellion. This motif reappears, hidden within the lining of Formula One Dress (1999), which turns a masculine-coded F1 racing uniform, complete with corporate sponsor logos, into women’s fashion that collapses distinctions between the racetrack, the catwalk and the gallery, treating speed, spectacle and display as interchangeable currencies in forging identity and longing. These themes reflect Fleury’s practice of deconstructing cultural products and weaponizing femininity, where wearable garments function simultaneously as art objects and critical commentaries on the body as surface, identity as performed persona, and the parallel systems through which fashion and art manufacture cultural power.
Premiering concurrently, Fleury’s Performa Biennial 2025 commission will combine sculpture, movement and sound in a series of tableaux vivants.
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Sylvie Fleury (*1961, Geneva) lives and works in Geneva. Selected solo exhibitions include Mrac Occitanie, Sérignan, France (2025), Kunsthal Rotterdam (2024), Kunstmuseum Winterthur (2023), Pinacoteca Agnelli, Turin, Aranya Art Center and Bechtler Stiftung, Uster (all 2022), Kunstraum Dornbirn, the Istituto Svizzero, Rome (both 2019), Villa Stuck, Munich (2016), Centro de Arte Contemporáneo, Malaga (2011), MAMCO, Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Geneva (2008–09), the Mozarteum, Salzburg (2005), ZKM – Museum für Neue Kunst, Karlsruhe, Le Magasin-Centre National d’Art Contemporain, Grenoble (both 2001), The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (1995). Selected group exhibitions include Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich (2022/2013), Jeu de Paume, Paris (2020), Grand Palais, Paris (2019), Kunsthaus Zurich (2018), Museum für angewandte Kunst, Frankfurt (2017), Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich (2016), Belvedere, Vienna (2012), Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich (2010), Chelsea Art Museum, New York (2007), MoMA PS1, New York (2006), Collection Lambert, Avignon (2003) and Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2000).
