Lionel Bovier – författare

A comprehensive examination of the Swiss artist’s colorful homage to Oldenberg’s soft sculpture installationsSwiss mixed-media artist Sylvie Fleury (born 1961) has long been interested in depicting the juncture of materialism and materiality in contemporary consumer culture. Her 1998 installation Bedroom Ensemble II draws directly from soft sculpture artist Claes Oldenberg, who also created bedroom installations under the same title; through inconsistent scale and unusual textures, Oldenberg’s bedroom suggests a disconnect from reality that becomes more apparent the longer one studies the piece. Fleury’s piece amplifies and subverts such ideas with her own vocabulary of textures and colors. While Oldenberg’s bedroom is a particularly cold example of 1960s interior design, Fleury’s piece bursts with vitality, practically begging viewers to touch the colorful faux fur that covers every stick of furniture in the installation. This book is the first comprehensive study of Bedroom Ensemble II and its relationship to the other Fleury pieces in MAMCO Geneva’s collection.

Inside one of the final works of a Fluxus artist for whom artmaking was part of a permanent, endless process embedded in everyday lifeThis book showcases Eins. Un. One... (1984), one of the last major works of French American artist Robert Filliou (1926–87), which consists of 5,000 blue, red, yellow, black, white and wood-colored dice of various sizes, each with a single dot on its face, randomly distributed over a surface of nine meters in diameter. This new volume of the MAMCO Collection series contains an introductory text by Michel Collet, who explains the conceptual power of Filliou's practice, while Sophie Costes carefully surveys all the artist's works in the museum's collection. She shows how Filliou used play, action, philosophy and language to question the foundations of artistic creation with humor and benevolence. While Filliou rubbed shoulders with Joseph Beuys, George Brecht, John Cage, Allan Kaprow and Daniel Spoerri, he remained a discrete figure who wanted to abolish the arbitrary hierarchies established by art history.