Swiss artist Sylvie Fleury worked with BEYER to produce an edition of eight 24-karat gold-plated New York City garbage cans, entitled Yes to All. Fleury’s work is alternately critical and adulatory of the commodification of our everyday lives, as her career has focused on the nexus between fashion, the commodity, and fine art. By distilling certain aspects of modern culture into a particular, specific form, Fleury is part of a group of European post-Minimalist artists whose work integrates a contemporary formalism with an ironic study of everyday life. As essayist Markus Bruderlin states in a catalogue on the artist’s interest in fashion and beauty, Fleury “rifles the shopping cart of the beauty industry to see what insights might be gleaned from displaying the products she finds as works of art.” Therefore, she draws on the heritage of Duchamp’s readymade and its attendant connotations as well as the formalist practice of reducing and abstracting an object to its most elemental form.
Drawing on a long history of the found object in art-making and exhibition, as well as a more contemporary exploration of status and commodity in the art world, this project represents the particular postmodern alchemy of turning the commonplace into the luxurious. Asking that we pay attention to the peripheral objects in our lives, Fleury’s 24-karat gold-plated garbage cans locate meaning in both high style and the everyday. In addition, as the city emerges from its darker years, it is replacing the old cans with newer, sleeker models. Fleury’s reclamation and appropriation of the old, used cans captures the way they signified both the underbelly of the city and its dogged appreciation of “the finer things.”
Fabrication
Fleury and BEYER realized the artist’s long-standing desire to utilize certain iconic forms of the New York urban landscape, in this case, the ubiquitous New York City garbage can. To begin the project, BEYER had to traverse the complex bureaucratic network of city administration to legally obtain the used and beaten-up receptacles. After overcoming several technical complications, BEYER was able to plate the steel cans with successive layers of nickel, brass and 24-karat gold, transforming this everyday object into something dazzling.
About the artist
Sylvie Fleury (b. 1961, Geneva, lives in Geneva) had her first exhibition in 1990 and has been a significant figure on the international art scene ever since. With important exhibitions at Postmasters Gallery in New York in 1992 and the São Paulo Biennial and the Migros Museum in Zurich in 1998, Fleury’s work has been seen throughout the world as part of both solo and group shows.
For more information and availability | info@beyerart.com | 917 957 4124