Nathalie Latour (b. 1978, France) is a French ceroplastician, art historian and researcher whose work revives the centuries-old art of wax modelling. Working exclusively with traditional materials and techniques developed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, she transforms an almost forgotten savoir-faire into a distinctly contemporary artistic language.

For PAN Amsterdam 2026, Jonathan F. Kugel – Cabinet de Curiosités Contemporain presents a selection of Latour's wax sculptures exploring the fragile boundaries between art and science, beauty and mortality, the natural and the artificial.
During the eighteenth century, wax became an extraordinary medium for representing the human body and the natural world. Its translucency, texture and remarkable chromatic possibilities allowed artists, anatomists and naturalists to reproduce fleeting forms with astonishing realism. Anatomical, botanical and zoological models emerged from an unusual collaboration between artistic virtuosity and scientific observation.
Latour draws directly upon this tradition. Using natural waxes, pigments and historic processes, she recreates techniques that have largely disappeared, applying them to a contemporary vision of the body and the ephemeral.
Her sculptures possess an intriguing ambiguity. At first glance they can appear to be historical objects, perhaps discovered in an anatomical collection or an eighteenth-century cabinet of curiosities. Yet their subjects, compositions and sensibility belong unmistakably to the present.
Through this tension, Latour gives new life to the tradition of ceroplasty, creating works that are at once scientifically precise, technically virtuosic and deeply poetic. They remind us of the enduring fascination of the cabinet of curiosities: a place where knowledge and imagination, beauty and strangeness, art and nature coexist.
Latour's work is represented in institutional collections including the Rijksmuseum Boerhaave in Leiden and the Musée d'Histoire de la Médecine in Paris.