Micha Laury
Micha Laury
Born in 1946 (ISR).
Lives and works in Paris.
Born in 1946 in the kibbutz Negba in Israel and isolated from the art world, Micha Laury began a self-taught artistic practice in 1967. Using his own experience of his environment, his multi-disciplinary work explores new ways of observing and thinking about the world; Micha Laury « uses his own memories, a certain feeling of isolation that he felt during his youth, the certain conviction that the space we inhabit cannot be neutral. Through a highly intimate network of connections, the themes raised by the objects and familiar territory in his graphic work are subjected to the scrutiny of awareness processes and reduced to formative diagrams. » (Anne Tronche).
His work explores the human place in contemporary society, networks and future environments, as well as power relationships and the insidious mechanisms of authority. From the late 1960s onwards, the artist developed an impressive series of installation and performance projects - which he pursued in the United States in 1971, then in France, where he settled in 1974 - revolving around physical and mental space: existence, pain, constraint, spatial alienation... but also bodily resistance.
From the 2000s onwards, a series of exhibitions enabled the realization of some of these projects which had previously remained on paper, such as the monumental installation Trap Space, Speak to the Wall, Mixed Vertigo Hole in the Soul
at the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Lyon in 2000, or the series of performances at the FRAC Franche-Comté in 2020-2022.
His work has been shown in numerous solo exhibitions in renowned institutions in France and abroad: at the Centre Pompidou in 1980 and at the Israel Museum the same year (winner of the Willem Sandberg prize), at the Frac Occitanie Montpellier (1994), the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Chartres and Calais (1995), the FRAC Normandie (1996 and 2003), the Cité des sciences et de l’industrie (2000), the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel (2013), the Musée d’art contemporain de Saint-Etienne (2014), the Kunstverein Bellevue-Saal in Germany (2019)... In 2025-2026, two retrospectives will be dedicated to his work at Frac Franche-Comté and MAC VAL.
Micha Laury’s work is part of major French and international public collections: the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon, the Musée d’arts de Nantes, the Jewish Museum in New York, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art... As well as: CNAP, Fonds d’art contemporain - Paris Collections, FRAC Alsace, FRAC Franche Comté, FRAC IDF, FRAC Normandie, FRAC Picardie...