Photo of Laure Prouvost

Laure Prouvost

Laure is the seventh former Goldsmiths student to win the Turner Prize, the UK’s most prestigious arts award.

Main details

Department Art
Occupation Artist
Country United Kingdom

Laure is the seventh former Goldsmiths student to win the Turner Prize, the UK’s most prestigious arts award.

She was awarded the prize for her film Wantee, which takes the audience in search of her fictional grandfather. The prize panel said the film, which played in a room styled like a tea party, was “outstanding for its complex and courageous combination of images and objects in a deeply atmospheric environment”. The piece was commissioned by Grizedale Arts and Tate for inclusion in a Kurt Schwitters retrospective at Tate Britain.

Her 2007 film, OWT, was made shortly before Laure came to Goldsmiths to study an . Opening with the instruction “full concentration is now requested; questions will be asked at the end”, it features American curator Michael Connor discussing different approaches to film, while a subtitled narrative appears at the bottom of the screen, raising questions about language and translation.

Laure was awarded the Max Mara Art Prize for Women in 2011 in collaboration with the Whitechapel Gallery, and in 2009 she received the EAST International Award, which recognises a new generation of artists with innovative approaches to making art.

As a French artist living and practising in London, she has previously talked to The Guardian about her reasons for coming to Britain. “I first came when I was a kid and loved it – people with pink hair, they seemed so free. I felt you can be who you are without the pressure of being judged. You can’t really do that in France.”

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