Galerie Nathalie Obadia is proud to present its fourth solo exhibition devoted to the work of Laure Prouvost, which at the same time marks over ten years of collaboration with the artist. Laure Prouvost was born in 1978 in Croix in northern France and went on to study at Central Saint Martins and Goldsmiths College in London. In 2013, she was the first French artist to be awarded the prestigious Turner Prize and has since developed a powerfully multifaceted body of work that has led to wide recognition on the international stage, most notably in 2019, when she invested the French Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale with her Deep See Blue Surrounding You / Vois Ce Bleu Profond Te Fondre, enjoying huge public and critical acclaim.
Nest In You highlights the artist’s ability to create emotive environments, employing an extremely diverse range of visual forms: a variety of different species of birds in blown Murano glass perch alongside tree branches combined with plaster, plastic, mirrors and paint. A nest in the form of a bird (Breeding Bird, 2022), made from a tapestry produced in Flanders, invites visitors inside to view the video The Nest. Previously shown between 2022 and 2024 at the Nasjonalmuseet in Oslo, Norway, the Moody Arts Center in Houston, USA and at the DePont Museum in Tilburg, Netherlands, this will be the first time the video has been projected in a gallery. Nest In You invites viewers to take refuge inside a cosy nest, indulging in a moment of respite under a protective mother’s wing. Within this comforting embrace, the weight of the world is lifted from their shoulders as their bodies become as light as a bird.
Laure Prouvost has designed in situ decors and landscapes that perfectly compliment the architecture of the gallery: installations, found and misappropriated objects, sculptures, tapestries, ceramics, glass metal and video projections compose these environments that invite visitors, in both mind and body, to embark on a multi-sensorial voyage blending stories both from real life and from dreams. Nest In You feels like an invitation to take to the open seas, gently rocked by Laure Prouvost’s narrating voice.
At a time in our present-day societies when the boundaries between the real and the virtual are becoming more and more indistinct – revealing their implicit fragility, based on individualism and physical detachment – this exhibition offers a moment’s break, away from the world as we know it into one that has its own temporality. It invites new reflection on the links which unite living beings with their environment. The role of the individual, her or his physical movement and interaction with elements from a nature that is at once real, credible or utopian create new narratives. Beyond the clearly visible playfulness and impertinence, Laure Prouvost’s oeuvre gets to grips with contemporary concerns such as feminism, global warming and migration in the third millennium. In her exhibitions in Venice and Oslo, birds and fish served to symbolise borderless travel – No More Front Tears, as the artist puts it herself.
In this tentacular universe where “nothing is connected to everything; everything is connected to something¹” humour and poetry extend into language. The artist handles words with brio, playing with the titles of her works, even that of the exhibition, before reinjecting them into her narratives. What might be considered linguistic awkwardness plays an active role in Laure Prouvost’s emotive universe, stimulating the visitor’s imagination.
Where does the installation begin and where does it end? While the nine works of the Mirror Paintings series (2024) serve to diffract the space - inviting the flora and fauna beyond its walls – the images in The Nest that accompany a children’s choir from Molenbeek seem gradually to emerge from the screen and take over the gallery. Laure Prouvost creates surprising hybrids, in which otherness engenders a new blossoming. Her images and words seem to both manipulate and reawaken the intimate memories of the visitors, who can choose to wander around or snuggle up to the maternal bosom of Nest In You.
“You know, when Grandma comes back from flying, and the plane Granddaddy says he is driving, when she lands, she jumps and gets a little bicycle. They go fast, cycling through the countryside, cycling fast, and slowly, birds are following her. First one, and two, and three, even four, five, six, and twenty, then a hundred, and maybe four hundred birds follow. (...)
This is the nesting place. (...) She wants to take you higher, open the ceiling, and levitate with you (...) She wants to tell you that just behind this world, all your favorite grandmothers are waiting for you. (...) We migrate together (...) To get her together.”
From The Nest, HD video, color, sound, 12:16 min, 2022
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¹ Donna Haraway, “Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene” from Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthuluceene, 2016, Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina, USA.
