Françoise Pétrovitch
Françoise Pétrovitch, Tome II, 2019
Semiose éditions
Text by Anne Bonnin
Françoise Pétrovitch is not a portraitist of individuality but of mood. Her works reflects a way of being, a fluctuating and uncertain presence/ absence that the artist never attelpts to elucidate. Succinct, nimble ans sensitive, her drawing like that of all great caricaturists, is capable of producing a being from a single line. All her paintings, both the lighter canvases and the more somber Nocturne, create a particular atmosphere : crystalline and aqueous in the former, more dense in the latter with figures emerging from a suffocating night, tarry like the blacks found in the 19th century paintings. The second volume deepens the nechantment engendered by her figures: sentimental, transparent and fluid crowds like the dreamy waters and fictions from witch they emerge.
Françoise Pétrovitch
Since the 1990s, Françoise Pétrovitch has produced one of the most powerful bodies of work on the French art scene. Amongst the numerous media she has explored—ceramics, glass, ink washes, painting, print and video—drawing retains pride of place. In constant dialog with the artists who have preceded her, she has been able to measure herself against the incontrovertible motifs of “high art”—Saint Sebastian, still lifes, etc. Pétrovitch’s art reveals an ambiguous world, willingly transgressive, playing with conventional boundaries and eluding any interpretation. Intimacy, fragments of life and disappearance, alongside the themes such as the double, transition and cruelty run through her work, which is inhabited by animals, flowers and beings, and whose atmosphere fluctuates between light and dark, rarely leaving the spectator unmoved.
She has enjoyed numerous solo exhibitions both in France and abroad, as in the Fonds Hélène et Édouard Leclerc in Landerneau and the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, in 2022, and the Musée de la Vie romantique, Paris, in 2023. In 2018, she was the first contemporary artist to be awarded a solo exhibition at the Louvre-Lens. Over the past few years, Pétrovitch has produced monumental wall drawings and large format ensembles, for the Galerie des Enfants at the Centre Pompidou, the West Bund Museum, Shanghai, or for the Ballets du Nord Company. Her works are included in many private and public collections, most notably the Centre Pompidou, Paris (FR), the Voorlinden Museum, Wassenaar (NL), the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C. (US), the Musée Jenisch, Vevey (CH), the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain of Saint-Etienne (FR) and of Strasbourg (FR), the MAC VAL (FR), the Salomon and Guerlain Foundations as well as Emerige Endowment Fund.