Laure Provoust, Kunstmuseum Luzern

The Turner Prize winner Laure Prouvost (*1978) is a wonderful story-teller who seduces her audiences by means of supposedly aesthetically amateurish material, sound and imagination. Her installations combine video, everyday objects, ceramics or painting with architecture, linking truth and poetry to create an idiosyncratic reality: was Laure Prouvost’s grandfather really a concept artist whose last work—a tunnel from Europe to Africa which he dug himself by hand—remained unfinished because her grandfather also got lost in it himself?The Kunstmuseum Luzern is the third and last stop for this solo exhibition, and to an extent it is also the high point, as Prouvost sees this tour as a process of growth that culminates in Luzern. While Laure Prouvost enabled the public at the Le Consortium / FRAC Bourgogne in Dijon to venture into the underground, and at the MMK Museum für moderne Kunst in Frankfurt took them through the earth, in Luzern she lets them rise to the earth’s surface again, to the light—in accordance with the fourth floor, where the rooms of the exhibition are located. 

Laure Prouvost understands Jean Nouvel’s building as a labyrinth through which the artist forges her own path to the light—so that the exhibition becomes a total physical experience.On entering the exhibition rooms visitors are welcomed with a drink to the artist’s narrative universe. The individual works of art are linked by a loose narrative surrounding her lost grandfather and the search for him. In the installation Maquette for Grand Dad’s Visitor Center (2014), for example, visitors can contribute a design for her grandfather’s memorial site, the tapestry woven by her grandmother Behind the lobby doors, the pepper is in the right eye (2016) shows the future façade of that Center, while the installation Grand Ma’s Dream (2013) tells us about her grandmother’s worries and dreams. Along the path to the light visitors can also discover important works like Wantee (Tate Britain, 2013 Turner Prize) and After, After (Lyon Biennale, 2013). If it was (2015, last shown at the Haus der Kunst in Munich) imagines a strange and wonderfully whimsical museum very much to the artist’s liking where the audience walks on a freshly kissed floor and is first given a neck rub. 

Volcano Paradise (2016), a huge upside-down volcano that Laure Prouvost developed specially for the Kunstmuseum, is the culmination of the exhibition. Once you reach the crater, the paradise with its palm trees, benches and bird-song lures visitors to stay a while.Prouvost’s narratives are seductive labyrinths, her installations marked both by a great light­ness, they are humorous and altogether sensual in their rich detail. But be careful: anyone who gets involved in her stories may never find their way out again…

2016-17

kunstmuseum Luzern, SW

Artwork by Laure Prouvost 

Curated by Fanni Fetzer

Architectural Design by Diogo Passarinho 

Project Leader: Diogo Passarinho

Team: Rita Freitas, Filipe Soares

Production Team: Tobias Oehmichen, Ciaran Wood, Maud Gyssels 

Exhibition dates: October 29,2016 - February 12, 2017

Catalogue: Mousse Publishing 

Photography: Marc Latzel, Kunstmuseum Luzern 

In collaboration with:Le Consortium, Dijon

Dropped here and then, to live, leave it all behindJune 25–September 25, 2016