Laurent Pernot France, b. 1980

After studying photography at the University of Paris VIII and video at Le Fresnoy Studio National des Arts Contemporains in Tourcoing, Laurent Pernot has been developing a polymorphous body of work over the past fifteen years. His artistic practice today encompasses a wide variety of media, including video, photography, painting, installation, sculpture, and new technologies.

His work explores themes of time, memory, and disappearance, with a poetic and existential dimension. Laurent Pernot is particularly interested in questions of impermanence, the fragility of existence, and the relationship between man and nature. His visual language often revolves around references to literature, poetry, and philosophy, sometimes resonating with places, objects, or historical figures (Hannah Arendt, Roland Barthes, Léon Blum, Eugène Delacroix, Émilie Dickinson, Françoise Héritier, Friedrich Hölderlin, Novalis, or Fernando Pessoa.

Through interdisciplinary installations, whether discreet or monumental, Laurent Pernot proposes visual and conceptual elements that imply a dimension of contemplation, a certain attention to matter and form, but also to the writing. His exhibitions often engage the viewer in a timeless, suspended world, as a photographic experience that defies time and death, playing with our perception.

Combining impermanence with the beauty of the world, love with eternity, memory with oblivion, or celebration with melancholy, his works confront us with the paradoxes that inhabit us. They invite us to rethink our shared memory and nature, meditating on our relationship with the long-term as opposed to the ephemeral destiny of the human being.

His work has notably been exhibited at the Miro Foundation in Barcelona, the Sketch Gallery in London, the Long Museum in Shanghai, MMOMA in Moscow, the Alvar Aalto Museum in Finland, the French Embassy in New Delhi, MUBE in São Paulo, the Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton in France, Palais de Tokyo, Maison Rouge, Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée Delacroix, MAC-VAL, Domaine Pommery, Voyage à Nantes, ICA Villeurbanne, LaM Villeneuve-d’Ascq, Château Toulouse-Lautrec, Domaine National de Saint-Cloud, and Saint Laurent Rive Droite in Paris and Los Angeles.

He has collaborated with Jean-Paul Gaultier as well as with several dance and theater directors and was recently invited to be the artistic director and scenographer for an exhibition at the Musée du Louvre-Lens.

Laurent Pernot has received several commissions for permanent works in public spaces and was the laureate of the prestigious SAM Prize for Contemporary Art in 2010. His work can be found in museums, foundations, and collections around the world. He is represented by Marguo Gallery in Paris.