Art and Cars: Sylvie Fleury, the Garage of the She-Devils

Sylvie Fleury, a Swiss artist born in Geneva in 1961, has built much of her work by blending worlds that appear far apart: fashion, cosmetics, luxury, science fiction, and automobiles. Since the 1990s she has transformed objects of everyday consumption into works of art, often playing with stereotypes tied to the masculine and the feminine. In her early years as an eclectic artist, a car club refused her membership. Fleury did not insist – she founded one of her own, entirely female, devoted above all to large custom American cars. She called it She-Devils on Wheels, taking the name from a 1968 American film directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis, the story of a women’s motorcycle gang that lived by its own rules and challenged rival gangs. The reference was anything but accidental: Fleury has described herself as a "punk feminist in disguise," and it was through automobiles, engines, garages, and custom culture that she began appropriating a traditionally masculine imagery in order to rewrite it on her own terms.

The automobile enters this game clearly as early as 1992 with Skylark. And the choice could not have been more personal: Fleury brings her own 1967 Buick Skylark in Champagne into the gallery, transforming it into a ready-made and placing it alongside entirely different objects – cosmetics, magazines, sunglasses, and Chanel accessories. A powder compact is even crushed beneath one of its wheels.