A Trip in the Street: Hidden Poems and Treasures Prosper Legault

Prosper Legault (b. 1994 in Bordeaux, FR) presents his fourth solo exhibition with Ruttkowski;68 and New York debut, A Trip in the Street: Hidden Poems and Treasures.

Legault’s latest body of work manifests as a constellation of sculptures and installations born from a restless energy—a palimpsest of contemporary consumer culture embodied on the streets of Paris. Legault’s work is fundamentally rooted in a process of reclamation of discarded objects imbued with a new life. Over the past years, the artist has navigated a series of temporary dwellings, a pattern of movement and creative production that reflects the unsteady, generative force of contemporary urban transience.

The exhibition’s title A Trip in the Street: Hidden Poems and Treasures speaks to the artist’s ongoing exploration and desire to uncover hidden narratives within the familiar. Legault demonstrates a mischievous resourcefulness by salvaging fragments from abandoned shop signs, posters and advertisements. These elements—neon signs, restaurant and beer adverts, jewelry displays—are assembled into micro-worlds that speak to our contemporary dilemma of overproduction and consumerism, a cycle of decay and regeneration. A sculpture features a pharmacy cross, with the phrase “I care” altered from “I don’t care,” encapsulating a complex relationship with societal anxiety and repair.

In a manner akin to Georges Perec’s playful deconstruction of alphabets and words, Legault treats the urban environment as a textual archive and his artistic building blocks. Extending from his parallel work in poetry and music, he samples and remixes its visual vocabulary—signs, adverts, and objects—assembling them with the deliberateness of a writer constructing a sentence.

With his first solo show in New York, Prosper Legault offers a playful, tongue-in-cheek vision built from the bizarre debris of our post-consumerist society.

Text by: Eunice Tsang

Opening reception      20/11/2025       6-8PM

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