Musée de l'Abbaye - Exhibition: Laurent Proux - "The tree and the machine

MUSÉE DE L'ABBAYE - EXHIBITION: LAURENT PROUX - "THE TREE AND THE MACHINE

📅 From Saturday 8 February to Sunday 28 September 2025
📍 Musée de l'Abbaye in Saint-Claude.

Laurent Proux's first solo exhibition in an institution, entitled L'arbre et la machine, features around forty paintings and engravings. It brings together the two bodies of his work: the first, "the body at work", focuses on the worker's gestures within structured workspaces. The second, "the liberated body", presents bodies freed from all constraints, merged and transformed into an ideal, flamboyant nature.
Laurent Proux depicts the environments and gestures of workers: the representation of the working world, and more broadly of people at work, is relatively rare in artistic representations, particularly in the field of contemporary art. The artist has seized on this, highlighting the mechanised space and the representation of the gestures of collective work.
Laurent Proux is also presenting a series of Arcadian works, echoing the theme of landscape in the museum's collections, in which stretched bodies are transformed into puppets or lovers, combining intimacy and nature.

An exhibition conceived during a residency at the Musée de l'Abbaye

During his artistic residency at the Musée de l'Abbaye in 2024, Laurent Proux visited a number of companies that are emblematic of the Haute-Jura region, such as Jeantet, Guichard and Chacom, all of which share a rich social history and local know-how that endures to this day. He also wanted to meet all those involved in the Saint-Claude ESAT (establishment and support service through work), which supports workers with disabilities.
The wood industry is an important part of the local economy, as illustrated by the company La Pessière, which builds poles, and the family sawmill Scie Coupe. The gestures observed 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 following the artist's stay in the region. Laurent Proux presents different types of workplace, from individual workshops to shared workspaces and open-air buildings.
The motif of the tree is at the heart of the exhibition, a human tree where bodies merge with the trunk and branches to create an image that is both seductive and strange.

Discover Laurent Proux

Born in 1980, Laurent Proux lives and works in Paris. In the course of 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 and the use of a raw, almost artificial range of colours. Described by some as a realist artist because of the subjects he depicts, and although he has chosen the factory as his preferred location, his work also explores more dreamlike spaces where bodies intermingle under a fiery light.