Françoise Pétrovitch

Since the 1990s, Françoise Pétrovitch has been creating some of the most powerful work on the French art scene. Among the many techniques she uses – ceramics, glass, washes, painting, printmaking and video – drawing holds a special place. In a constant dialogue with the artists who preceded her, and confronting the unavoidable motifs of ‘great painting’ – Saint-Sébastien, still lifes, etc. -Pétrovitch reveals an ambiguous world, willingly transgressive, playing with conventional boundaries and escaping all interpretation. Intimacy, fragments, disappearance, the themes of the double, transition and cruelty run through her work, which is populated by animals, flowers and beings, and whose atmosphere, alternately bright or nocturnal, rarely leaves the viewer unscathed.

 

She regularly has solo exhibitions in France and abroad, including the Fonds Hélène et Édouard Leclerc in Landerneau and the Bibliothèque nationale de France in 2022, and the Musée de la Vie romantique in Paris in 2023. In 2018, she became the first contemporary artist to have a solo exhibition at the Louvre-Lens.

 

Over the last few years, Françoise Pétrovitch has produced monumental wall drawings and very large ensembles, such as for the Galerie des enfants at the Centre Pompidou, the West Bund Museum in Shanghai and the Ballets du Nord. Her work can be found in numerous public and private collections, including the Centre Pompidou, Paris (FR), the Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar (NL), the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC (US), the Musée Jenisch, Vevey (CH), the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain de Saint-Étienne (FR) and the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain de Strasbourg (FR), the MAC VAL (FR), numerous FRACs, as well as the Salomon and Guerlain Foundations and the Emerige Endowment Fund.


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Selected Works

Biography ↓

Exhibitions