4th edition, 2011–2013, Laure Prouvost

You open up your subconscious, and in this way make yourself vulnerable, but knowing that we are all vulnerable.
Laure Prouvost

For the fourth edition of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women, winning artist Laure Prouvost (b. 1978) created the ambitious large-scale installation Farfromwords: cars mirrors eat raspberries when swimming through the sun, to swallow sweet smells, a tribute to the aesthetic and sensual pleasures of Italy and to the historical idea of the Mediterranean as a place to travel in search of inspiration.

Farfromwords, Prouvost’s winning project for the Max Mara Art Prize for Women, opens up new horizons of meaning by deconstructing the connection between language, comprehension and incomprehension, an interest that grew out of the French artist’s personal experience of living as a foreigner in Great Britain.

As if on a sentimental journey, Prouvost embraced the possibilities offered by her travelling residency not to meet pre-established educational goals, but to learn more about herself and her deeper emotional landscape.

During the Italian residency that was organized for her, Prouvost stayed at the British School in Rome and in the countryside near Biella, hosted by Fondazione Pistoletto. These experiences allowed Prouvost to explore different worlds – ancient and modern, urban and rural.

Farfromwords

Whitechapel Gallery (20 March–7 April 2013)

Collezione Maramotti (5 May–3 November 2013)

The Italian residency organized for Prouvost led to the creation of the large circular room in Farfromwords, where many different media – photographic prints, collages, videos and graffiti – enter into dialogue with each other to summon up surreal, visionary images. Taking an approach that evokes the genre of panoramic painting, the artist designed a cylindrical structure that brings together collages, monitors and film footage. In sharp contrast to its stark, bare, industrial exterior, the inside of the installation presents a vast, circular series of drawings, applied elements and moving images that saturate the twenty-two meters of the canvas.

Prouvost has assembled a fragmented vision of her Italian memories, a lush green world that revels in luxuriant foliage, water, fresh fruit and its inconspicuous consumption. The canvas becomes a panorama of sensory pleasures, recreating tastes, smells, textures and sounds in a 360° vision. This immersive environment leads into an inner space where visitors encounter Swallow (2013). This film follows the rhythmic breathing of a large mouth, its image and sounds alternating with vivid, idyllic, sensual apparitions flooded with shimmering light: blue skies with white clouds scudding across them, gusts of wind and birdflight, ice cream, ripe fruit and blossoming flowers, embraces and caresses, cool grass, springs and fountains.

After the initial stage of the exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, Prouvost reconceived and adapted it for the spaces of Collezione Maramotti. For the opening in Reggio Emilia, Prouvost also took part in a conversation with journalist and writer Melissa Gronlund. Their talk revolved around the relationship between art/representation and real life, and the connection between the “ordinary” and “dramatic” that Prouvost puts into the concrete context of her Italian experience.

This conversation, titled Competition with Real Life, was accompanied by a dramatic performance by the Italian opera singer and performer Cristina Zavalloni, helping to form an overall vision focused not only on grand ideas, but on the essential pleasures of life.

In December 2013, Laure Prouvost was the recipient of the prestigious Turner Prize.

In 2019 she showed her project Deep See Blue Surrounding You in the French Pavilion for the 58th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, May You Live In Interesting Times, curated by Ralph Rugoff.