During the 2024 Paris Olympics, French contemporary artist Laurent Perbos unveiled his sculptural installation Beauty and Gesture (La Beauté et le Geste) on the steps of the Palais Bourbon, home to the French National Assembly. Inspired by the iconic Greek sculpture Venus de Milo (Vénus de Milo), the work features six sculptures reinterpreting the figure of Venus as athletes carrying instruments symbolising different sports from the Olympic and Paralympic Games. Beauty and Gesture tours to City of Dreams, Macau, resonating with the 15th National Games jointly hosted by the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macau Greater Bay Area, and infusing the city’s public space with cultural vitality through the interplay of art and athletics.

Laurent Perbos was born in 1971 in Bordeaux, France; he currently lives and works in Marseille and Paris. Perbos primarily works in sculpture, exploring mediums such as painting, photography, installation, and performance. Drawing inspiration from art history and personal experiences, he creates imaginative, lyrical, and sensitive worlds infused with vitality. Perbos’s notable work Beauty and Gesture was exhibited during the 2024 Paris Olympics at the French National Assembly. His works have also been exhibited at the Montélimar Contemporary Art Museum, MAIF Social Club in France, Shanghai Qiantan Taikoo Li, and Shanghai Lujiazui Central Green Park. His pieces are housed in public and private collections, including the Marseille Municipal Fund and the National Sports Museum in Nice, France.

In Beauty and Gesture, artist Laurent Perbos reimagines the world-renowned classical masterpiece Venus de Milo—a sculpture unearthed in 1821, celebrated for its incomplete form, and long regarded as a treasure of the Louvre Museum. In Perbos’s reinterpretation, Venus is granted a new life: her arms are restored, and she wields sporting equipment from various Olympic disciplines, appearing as an active presence upon the stage of a contemporary athletic celebration.

The six statues unfold in the six colors of the rainbow, recalling the polychrome traditions of ancient sculpture while signifying the values of equality, inclusion, and diversity. The purple Venus swings a tennis racket; the yellow balances a surfboard; the blue is frozen at the height of a basketball match. Most emblematic is the orange Venus, who retains one broken arm while raising a bow with the other—an homage to Paralympic archery and a tribute to athletes with disabilities. The green Venus dons bright red boxing gloves, embodying resilience and combat, while the red Venus captures the vigor and velocity of the javelin throw.

Through vivid color and charged gesture, Perbos transforms Venus from a silent goddess of myth into a contemporary emblem of Olympism. No longer a static icon of beauty, she confronts the male-dominated narratives of sport and asserts values of equality and diversity through a distinctly female presence. In this dialogue between antiquity and the present, Venus is reborn as a modern symbol of the Olympic spirit, embodying the enduring athletic ideals of “beauty, attitude, and transcendence.”