Françoise Pétrovitch
Dialogues inattendus au Musée Marmottan Monet, 2025
Semiose, Musée Marmottan Monet
Since 2019, the Musée Marmottan Monet has invited a creator to produce works related to its collections. Through their critical eye and their practice, 21st-century visual artists enrich the approach, the feeling, but also the knowledge of the works of their predecessors. The past feeds the present. The reverse is equally true. Françoise Pétrovitch is the ninth artist to be invited to these "Dialogues inattendus".
Maintaining a constant exchange with the artists who have gone before her, it was only natural that Françoise Pétrovitch should be invited by the Musée Marmottan Monet to take part in an "unexpected dialogue". It was with a series of "Suns" that she chose to engage in dialogue with another painter, Berthe Morisot. The two artists have in common an exploration of a multiplicity of artistic techniques, a desire to capture the intimate in all its depth and a taste for the fragment. Each tells the story of her own era, and this exchange between them highlights the evolution of the way we look at the world, from the promising days of Impressionism to the anxieties of the 21st century.
Françoise Pétrovitch
Born in Chambéry in 1964, Françoise Pétrovitch lives in Cachan and teaches at the École Estienne in Paris. Very much attached to the book format and the immediacy of drawing, she also works in ceramics and more recently in painting and video. On paper or in the form of murals: kids, dolls and animals of uncertain identity merge by capillary action. Their secrets and concerns germinate through the use of colour and their melancholy is tenderly diluted in watercolour and ink. Femininity takes on a mythic aspect and the intimate is opened up to the world. With her publication Radio Pétrovitch, the artist responds through the medium of drawing to daily news flashes. In 2014, the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Chambéry exhibited forty of her works in an important solo show.
Her work features in the collections of the MNAM - Centre Georges Pompidou, the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature in Paris, the MAC/VAL in Vitry-sur-Seine, the Leepa-Rattner Museum in Tarpon Springs (USA) and various FRACs. In 2015, the LAAC of Dunkerque curated a solo show of her works within the collection of the museum and the one of the FRAC Nord-Pas-de-Calais. She represents France in the Organic Matter - Women to watch 2015 at the National Museum of Women in the Arts de Washington D.C. (USA).
In 2016, Françoise Pétrovitch's solo show was held at the Frac PACA, the Tarascon Castle and in Arles. In 2018, two solo shows will be dedicated to her work at Keramis and at the Centre de la gravure in La Louvière (BE).