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‘Just be radical’: the feminist artist giving Matisse a modern punk twist
In her irreverent new exhibition, Sylvie Fleury is pairing the great modernist’s drawings and cutouts with her own fashion-focused workWhen Henri Matisse described his work as “in step with the future”, he was thinking about his revolutionary cutouts, made with collaged coloured paper, rather than, say, the evolution of the women’s movement or consumer culture. The leading Swiss artist Sylvie Fleury came of age with the latter, but when she was invited to select drawings and cutouts from the Matisse estate for an exhibition, she was struck by the enduring immediacy of his vision. “My feeling with modernist artists is that, a lot of the time, they were trying to define what was happening within the history of art,” she says preparing for Drawing on Matisse, her showwhich situating 16 of his works within and alongside her impishly feminist and fashion-focused sculpture. “With Matisse, it was more like: ‘Just do it, be radical.’”Fleury well understands the power of disru...
Politics
