Welcome to the Pleasuredome was the 1984 debut album of Frankie Goes to Hollywood, the British band whose identify self-ironically evoked the beginnings of Frank Sinatra’s profession within the American dream manufacturing facility. Sylvie Fleury’s new present at Karma Worldwide, a gallery whose identify merged the primary letters of its two feminine founders’ first names right into a karmic future, is neither a tribute to the band, nor to the singer. It’s not an homage to the stellar forged of males who made the American minimal artwork, and neither it’s a dismissal of their artwork. Fleury drops pretend eyelashes, fairly actually casting a look on Carl’s flooring piece; she has fashions carrying stilettos stroll on Carl’s flooring; she hangs garments, arranges sundry micro-libraries of discovered books (together with an out of date assortment of quick tales “Studying for Males” and a listing of Anne Truit, one in every of three girls within the forged of forty-three artists of the enduring 1966 exhibition on the Jewish Museum in New York), and units up tiny architectural fashions constructed of lipstick tubes and make-up bins on prime of Sol’s cubes, taking them fairly actually as furnishings; she scratches, bends and stains the sheets of painted steel gently crashing a automobile into them (“right this moment vehicles are all plastic,” Fleury mentioned with some contempt)—maybe pondering of John, or Andy, or Crash Take a look at Dummies, about all of them, none of them, only for some time, or in no way.

There’s a lightness within the feeling of melancholy pervading the exhibition, with a twist of irony, and only a tiny drop of cynicism. This cocktail evades categorizations as “appropriation artwork” (boring), critique of the male-dominated artwork and structure world (that when was), or feminist reclaiming of the instruments and supplies of artwork. Artwork-as-commodity, fortunately colluding with the luxurious business—together with style that’s within the strategy of turning into a meta-category for all issues creative—is the vogue of the artwork business of the 2020s. When issues crumble and time is out of joint, all of it occurs elsewhere, to another person—however to not us and never within the artwork market’s insular paradise. Sylvie Fleury has been strolling the alleys of style and lanes of the artwork world for awhile now and she or he is returning her observations of the flâneuse to the guests of the exhibition: see the impressions of Frankie’s journey to the celebs, as instructed by Sylvie Fleury—welcome to the truth, among the many mirrors, neon lights, mascaras and discarded desires.

—Adam Szymczyk

at Karma Worldwide, Zurich
till July 15, 2023