Laura Limbourg
FUTURE FAIR NYC with Ballon Rouge, Brussels
Booth U-10
May 10-13, 2023
Ballon Rouge presents a solo booth with works by Laura Limbourg (b. 1996) for FUTURE FAIR NYC.
At the booth will be a selection of works from her newest series which points to her first solo with the gallery following the fair, titled DEUCE, paired with works from a previous series, Taiwanese Series.
Her newest series was made after her time at a residency and traveling in the United States in late 2022. In these works Limbourg equips her characters with a tennis racket, a clever innuendo to the fast-paced dynamics of the art world, where players’ success comes down to their careful balance of tactics and sportsmanship. The players, her real-life friends from the art world, become the protagonists. Leopards and tigers appear as guardians for the artist and her friends in this series, in the same vein they were the wished-for protectors for the women she depicted in the earlier series that was made after a trip to Southeast Asia. Interweaving elements from the past and present, Limbourg is still holding on to the iconography of that experience in Southeast Asia. And, present at the booth are several works from that previous series as well.
During her six-month stay in Southeast Asia in 2020, culminating in her diploma presentation in Prague the following year, Limbourg was confronted with the objectification, exploitation and abuse of women and children through the very visible industries of prostitution and sex tourism in the region. She was confronted by the oxymoronic and ultimately hypocritical nature of these local cultures that have so much respect for historic objects and traditional values but where the authorities fail to put a stop to the atrocious human trafficking in pursuit of economic advantages. Limbourg’s Southeast Asian compositions bring to life a world where the sensory and the fictional, the ancient and the contemporary, the good and the evil seem to collide in a heedfully formulated “forest of symbols”.
The female figures that inhabit her psychologically charged compositions characterized by this vivid dichotomy of contrasting forces, are not portrayed as victims but rather as heroines who triumphantly emerge amidst the moral decay. The gaze is reversed, and power is given to the subject, now almost regal.
Laura Limbourg (b. 1996, Belgium) is a painter and sculptor. Her work explores fetishization, colonialism, sex tourism, gender, and history. She uses symbology and nudity, both classic tropes in painting to lure the viewer into a comfort in looking, all while implicating us in the very issues she wants to raise. And, she uses animals as representational and allegorical entities in her works. She has exhibited in the United States, the Czech Republic, Taiwan, and the UK. She is based in Prague.
*The above text was taken from the text written by Judit Krijgh-Bozsan for her upcoming solo at the gallery titled 'DEUCE.'