Laure Prouvost

With ten paintings, a video work and a light/sound installation from the project Re-dit-en-un-in-learning CENTER, De Pont has purchased its first works by the French artist Laure Prouvost.

Prouvost (Lille, 1978) has been known internationally for years. She won both the Max Mara Art Prize for Women (2011) and the British Turner Prize (2013); and with a controversial contribution she represented France at the Venice Biennale in 2019. Prouvost is fascinated with language and communication, and with the relationship between language and its representation. By way of stories that are a hybrid mix of reality and fantasy, and with enigmatic and sensual images, she endeavors to make palpable a range of emotions and (physical) sensations that can scarcely be captured in single words or ideas. Generally she does this in spatial installations sculptures, tapestries, paintings, collages and videos complement each other and merge with each other almost fluidly. Prouvost is moreover particularly interested in miscommunication, as a result of translation for instance. She grew up in the northern French city of Lille, studied visual arts at Goldsmiths College in London, and now lives and works in Antwerp. She is, in short, accustomed to shifting back and forth between French, Flemish and English – finding, precisely in those gaps, room for new associations.