Dates and times:
from Saturday 08/02/2025 to Sunday 28/09/2025
ABBEY MUSEUM - EXHIBITION: LAURENT PROUX – "THE TREE AND THE MACHINE" From Saturday, February 8 to Sunday, September 28, 2025 Abbey Museum in Saint-Claude. Laurent Proux's first personal exhibition within an institution, entitled L'arbre et la machine, presents around forty paintings and engravings. It brings together the two bodies of work present in his work: the first, “the body at work”, focuses on the gestures of the worker within structured work spaces. The second, “the liberated body,” presents bodies freed from all constraints, merged and transformed into an ideal and flamboyant nature.
Laurent Proux depicts the environments and gestures of workers: the representation of the working world and more broadly of man at work is relatively little present in artistic representations, particularly in the field of contemporary art. The artist takes hold of it and highlights the mechanized space and the representation of the gestures of collective work. Laurent Proux also presents a set of Arcadian works, echoing the theme of landscape in the museum's collections, where stretched bodies are transformed and become in turn puppets or lovers, mixing intimacy and nature. An exhibition designed during a residency at the Abbey MuseumDuring his artistic residency at the Abbey Museum in 2024, Laurent Proux visited various emblematic companies in the Haut Jura region, such as Jeantet, Guichard and Chacom, which share a rich social history and local know-how that continues to this day. He also wanted to meet all the stakeholders of the ESAT of Saint-Claude (establishment and work support service) who support workers with disabilities. An important source of income in the region's economy, the timber industry is illustrated by the La Pessière company which builds logs and the family sawmill Scie Coupe. The observed gestures become motifs and subjects that the artist reproduces in monumental paintings. The series of paintings on the theme of the machine was produced for this exhibition at the end of the artist's stay in our territory. Laurent Proux presents different types of workplaces, from the individual workshop to the shared workspace, to the building set up in the open air. The motif of the tree is at the heart of the exhibition, a human-tree where the bodies merge with the trunk and branches in an image that is both seductive and strange. Discovering Laurent ProuxBorn in 1980, Laurent Proux lives and works in Paris. Throughout his projects around the world, from Madrid to Los Angeles, via Chicago, the artist has developed an imagery marked by the exploration of the human body and the machine through pictorial processes such as fragmentation, exaggeration or the use of a raw, almost artificial, range of colors.
| Basic rate / adult rate | 5,50 € - 6,50 € |
