Laure Prouvost solo exhibition at Longlati Foundation, Shanghai

20 July 2022

Titled 'Theatergarden and A Be(a)stiary of the Anthropocene', Laure Prouvost's latest solo exhibition at Longlati Foundation, Shanghai presents a series of paintings and glass sculptures along with installations, hand-woven tapestry and video. The body of work portrays the disorientation of life-(trans)form in the face of global climate change, while mapping the precariousness of modern language beyond sociopolitical confines.

The very title of the display draws inspiration from the groundbreaking exhibition 'Theatergarden Bestiarium' organized by Chris Dercon as premiered in 1989 at Institute for Contemporary Art, P.S.1 Museum, New York. Derived from the text 'Bestiarium: Theater and Garden of Violence, War and Happiness' by Rüdiger Schöttle, the curatorial adventure harnesses the classical model of Baroque and Rococo garden, and crystallizes more than 10 artists’ ideas into an imaginary field where the natural and the artificial worlds merge.

'Theatergarden and A Be(a)stiary of the Anthropocene' investigates the composition of Chinese classical garden and converts the gallery into a conservatory accordingly, thus constituting an existential ground for reconceiving the embodied rhetorics in Prouvost’s oeuvre. Her sculptural assemblage of hybrid creatures intersperses the bedding plants freely and articulates the remnants of preverbal accounts indicated in the rest works, in which shapes of human and non-human apparatuses are displayed in various layers of surreal or quirky embellishment, then carefully configured to incarnate the tension between serenity and cruelty.

On view until 21 August 2022. Find further information via Longlati Foundation.

Image: Installation view of “Laure Prouvost: Theatergarden and A Be(a)stiary of the Anthropocene,” 2022, courtesy Longlati Foundation, Shanghai