French artist to spend week in a prehistoric sculpture

Abraham Poincheval inside of his work Lion Man AFP

French performance artist Abraham Poincheval on Sunday stepped inside an enlarged reproduction of a paleolithic carving of a lionman where he will spend the next week. Last year Poincheval grabbed international media attention by shutting himself inside a rock in a Paris exhibition space.

With his two children watching, Poincheval shut himself inside the 3.20 metre-high carving in the garden of the Aurignac museum in south-west France.

The museum specialises in prehistory and the original work, carved from a mammoth's tusk, is the oldest anthropomorphic sculpture known today, according to its director, Joëlle Arches.

It was created by some of the first homo sapiens to live in Europe.

"This lion is a sort of mirror for the men who lived 30,000 years ago," the 45-year-old artist said.

Poincheval enters the lion-man

Une semaine debout dans le noir.... L'artiste Abraham Poincheval s’enferme dans la réplique grandeur nature d'une statuette préhistorique #AFP pic.twitter.com/5YjPECMudM

  Agence France-Presse (@afpfr) 2 juin 2018

Poincheval's previous "journeys in capsules" include:

• A week inside a rock at Paris's Palais de Tokyo in 2017;

• A week in a hole under rock weighing one tonne, also in 2017;

• A week on a suspended platform near Paris's Gare de Lyon station in 2016;

• Two weeks inside a stuffed bear in 2015;

• A trip up the River Rhône in a six-metre-long bottle in 2015.