At the LaM’s invitation, Laure Prouvost takes a fresh look at a Museum that marked her childhood and teenage years. French by her northern origins, British by the artistic training she underwent in London and Belgian by her studio in Antwerp, Laure Prouvost is an international artist who has long developed a pronounced taste for the poetry of languages, the mix of people. Summoning up a familiar world, the artist adopts a surrealist approach in order to transform it into a fanciful dreamlike space where reality and fiction intermingle.

Deep See Blue Surrounding You / Vois ce bleu profond te fondre, the title of the installation she created for the French Pavilion at the most recent Venice Biennale, is organised around a video that takes viewers on an initiatory road trip that includes Nanterre, Grigny, Roubaix, the slag heaps of the Pas-de-Calais mining area, Postman Cheval’s Ideal Palace in Hauterives, Marseille and Venice. Peopled by a dozen characters from various backgrounds, languages and ages, each of them giving full rein to their individual performative skills (dance, magic, music, poetry and so on), this epic, both tangible and imaginary, provides a poetic portrait of the France of outsiders while examining the possibility of depicting a fluid, globalised world.

An octopus makes its appearance, a symbol of these shifting, polymorphous exchanges.

The importance accorded to tactile thought and visual sensations underlies Laure Prouvost’s works and installations,which combine use of contemporary technologies (video, audio recordings, etc.) with traditional knowhow (tapestry, blown glass, ceramics, etc.) and natural constituents (water, smoke, earth, pebbles, plants, etc.) and also include salvaged objects, detritus and organic components.  

Turning the LaM’s tentacular spaces into a sensory extension of her own world, Laure Prouvost wanted to appropriate the art brut collection and create unprecedented interactions. Her own creations will be dialoguing with a selection of works from the L’Aracine donation, on themes dear to her heart: the porosity between fiction and autofiction, the ability to create stories, eroticism, combinations of genres and influences, and a taste for bricolage and the “handmade”. Incorporating works by Séraphine Louis, Michel Nedjar, Jules Leclercq, Johann Korec, the Philadelphia Wireman, Jeanne Laporte Fromage, ACM, Anna Zemankova and others, she provides an alternative itinerary through the Museum, clouding landmarks and muddying paths while adding a further chapter to her personal mythology.

Laure Prouvost has also been invited to teach at the Le Fresnoy school this year.

Curatorship :

Marie-Amélie Senot, Associate Curator at the LaM

In partnership with Institut Français, Nathalie Obadia Gallery, carlier | gebauer, Lisson Gallery

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