Laure Prouvost
Waiting For You, 2017
Wandtapijt
250 × 197 cm
About the work
In Waiting For You, you see a reclining woman holding a bunch of celery.
The image refers to a classic motif from art history: the odalisque, the reclining female figure traditionally depicted as an idealised nude.
Prouvost deliberately transforms this tradition. The woman before you is less idealised and is humorously concealed in part behind strikingly green celery.
The material is also significant. Prouvost chose tapestry, a medium she uses to challenge the traditional hierarchy between art forms. The work was produced in Wielsbeke, Belgium.
Prouvost thus transforms a traditional image from a male-dominated art history. Her woman does not passively await the male gaze but assumes a contemporary, female and playful presence.
Laure Prouvost’s oeuvre twists, shifts and breathes. It is moving and playful, wondrous and physical, abstract and concrete. Her images whisper, fall silent, rustle and flicker. Together, they form an endless kaleidoscopic world.
Prouvost possesses the qualities that distinguish a remarkable artist: a unique worldview, mastery of her craft and, above all, an innovative artistic approach. She considers herself a translator. She translates words into images, sensory impressions into films, and images into sentences filled with playful misspellings. Misunderstandings and shifts emerge in the process—and it is precisely in these that her strength lies.
Her family members also form part of her universe. Her grandfather is a conceptual artist who digs a tunnel to Africa, leaving the house perpetually covered in mud. He was friends with Kurt Schwitters, whose works Prouvost’s grandmother uses as trays, small tables and seats. She drinks tea with gin and creates tapestries for her granddaughter. Meanwhile, an uncle founded a travel agency that takes visitors into the depths of their subconscious.
Fact and fiction are continually intertwined. Images, stories and characters develop without restraint, together forming a world that fully embraces the visitor: a world that appeals to all the senses, touches and moves us, and invites us to look and think differently.
Laure Prouvost
° 1978 in Lille, France. She lives and works in Antwerp and London. She studied at Goldsmiths College and Central Saint Martins in London.
Language is the common thread running through her multifaceted oeuvre, which plays with words and meaning. In her videos, sound works, installations and performances, she uses words as building blocks for the imagination. In a humorous and idiosyncratic way, she plays with misunderstandings, misinterpretations and everything that can be lost in translation.
In 2011, she received the Max Mara Art Prize for Women, and in 2013 she became the first French artist to win the prestigious Turner Prize. Her work has been exhibited internationally, and in 2019 she represented France at the 58th Venice Biennale.
Laure Prouvost has presented her work at leading museums and art institutions worldwide. Her exhibition WE FELT A STAR DYING was shown at LAS Art Foundation in Berlin and OGR Torino in 2025, before travelling to the Grand Palais in Paris in 2026. In Marseille in 2025, she also presented In the Fort, Souls Are at Mucem and Mère We Sea at La Chapelle du Centre de la Vieille.
Other recent solo exhibitions have been held at ACCA in Melbourne (2024), Museum De Pont in Tilburg (2024), the Moody Center for the Arts in Houston (2023), Kunsthalle Wien (2023), the National Museum in Oslo (2022), the Longlati Foundation in Shanghai (2022) and Atelier Hermès in Seoul (2022).
Her work has previously been presented by international institutions including Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen, M HKA in Antwerp, Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Bass Museum in Miami, Kunstmuseum Luzern, Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan, the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, Haus der Kunst in Munich and the New Museum in New York.