Jean-Marc Prouveur

Who is Jean-Marc Prouveur?

Jean-Marc Prouveur is a French artist and filmmaker. He attended L'Ecole de Beaux-Arts in Cambrai.

On arriving in London in 1976, he became involved in the circle of Derek Jarman, and subsequently, in the making of the 1977 film Jubilee.

For much of the 1980s Prouveur worked independently in the photographic medium, creating artworks characterised by the "outlaw sexuality" of the male nude, punctuated by religious iconography, showing in London, Paris, New York, Amsterdam and Rome. He acknowledges artistic precedents in F. Holland Day and Wilhelm von Gloeden, and to a shared artistic preoccupation with contemporaries Robert Mapplethorpe and Gilbert and George.

In the early 1990s Prouveur moved into film, launching his Liquid London studio. His early short films, Dance Macabre and the Georges Bataille-inspired Solar Anus were elegies to AIDS; later in the decade he moved closer to pornography.

Prouveur now divides his time between London and Auvergne, France. He continues to experiment in photography and film whilst researching an essay on the history of pornography and its place in art. In February 2009 he announced that he is in negotiations to exhibit new works in Paris.