Frédérique Fleury’s origins lie in painting.
After graduating from the École des Beaux-Arts de Lyon in 1981, a trip to New York sparked a fascination with the artists of the Pattern Painting movement. Upon her return to France, she began cutting her canvases, layering them, outlining motifs, and playing with color—interweaving ornamentation while disrupting sinuous lines with geometry. Slowly, she moved toward three-dimensional work. She mixes materials and repurposes objects, already confronting the divide between "high" and "low" art, with an affinity for both the minuscule and the monumental.
However, it was in Crete that everything shifted. Moved by the great jars of Knossos, she discovered ceramics. In the 1990s, she transitioned from the flat surface of the canvas— which she had already been attempting to explode and swell—to sculpture. Without abandoning color, she now works primarily in ceramics while continuing her relentless exploration of materials.
Her desire for freedom did not stop there; she sought to break all shackles. For her, there is nothing like "containing" rounded forms—squeezing and constraining them—so that they may give birth to new shapes. She fills forms resembling tubes, balloons, or legs made of linen-cotton fabric, which she binds and tightens in the manner of Japanese bondage or a gardener ligating branches. Gradually, fragmented and swollen bodily forms emerge. Over time, these experiments in tension have evolved into a play that is at once erotic, "rock- and-roll," and even political when she utilizes authentic tapestries. Indeed, the act of stuffing such traditional, patrimonial textiles serves as a metaphor against a narrow- minded, petit-bourgeois spirit. It becomes a liberating act against decorative flourishes— defying both the high-warp tapestries of the aristocracy and the kitsch prints of the working class. Her motto has become: "To forbid oneself nothing".
Since then, Frédérique Fleury has been building a body of work defined by indulgence and jubilation—a world of hidden compartments and mysteries—allowing herself every audacity. She circles the body in a sort of dance where opposites intertwine, shattering the limits of the so-called "French good taste". Or, as she puts it with a touch of malice: "How to make lace with a bulldozer". Unfazed by occasional overflows, her ceramic sculptures exude a wild, restless energy that lends them a Baroque quality. She works in series and through contrasts, evoking a strangeness that can border on unease or fear. We find ourselves caught between attraction and repulsion before this profusion of fleshy flowers with serrated, saw-toothed petals. The plump becomes predatory.
Pearl necklaces and chains may accentuate the swelling forms, but they coil like serpents ready to stifle and strangulate. The botanical mutates into the animal; fauna metamorphoses into flora. The whole becomes a supple landscape—immobile, yet seemingly in motion. Frédérique Fleury practices a hybrid art. One massive piece, resembling a watchful octopus, spreads its voluptuous black tentacles, adorned with silver bracelets and large beads as shiny as jet. This bizarre cephalopod, crowned like a Queen of the dark depths, is capable of retracting and rising, transformed into a King of mollusks—a shimmering totem. Fairy tales are never far away, as seductive as they are terrifying.
Fleury is equally fond of spreading her large pieces horizontally as she is of raising them vertically into enchanted columns in her Totem series. She is exhibiting with Galerie Analora at the international fair Ceramic Brussels 2026. Her totem, Black is Black, features velvety black skin enhanced by obsidian-like beads and adorned with arabesques resembling truncated capitals, hemmed with braids or rubber tire-track textures. Humor is always there, lurking beneath the surface. Similarly, her piece Les Endormies, arranged in a circle on the floor, recalls in both subject and white palette her work Succulentes, which was exhibited in Portugal in 2023 near the work of Joana Vasconcelos. In place of the crawling, interlocking ivory cacti with their blossoming porcelain flowers—at once prickly and swollen like fruit—we find an accumulation of cornucopias and cones with corollas that are simultaneously suave and bristling. The Rococo is close at hand in Les Endormies: the powdered white of Madame de Pompadour, satins, pâte sablée, and snowy stucco—a whole spectrum of whites, occasionally highlighted with gold or silver. Yet, the artist never forgets to corset her chiseled works, infusing them with a poisonous edge to avoid any hint of mawkishness.
As the Surrealists famously declared: "Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all".
Text by Elisabeth Vedrenne (Connaissance des Arts)
