FRANÇOISE PÉTROVITCH
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Françoise Pétrovitch, Tenir, 2022, Oil on canvas, 130 x160 cm.
Installation view: Next, Gowen, 2023.
Installation view: Next, Gowen, 2023.
Left: Sébastien Mettraux, Ex Codice #11, 2023, oil on canvas, 220 x 260 cm
Right: Françoise Pétrovitch, Tenir, 2022, oil on canvas, 130 x160 cm
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ABOUT
Since the 1990s, Françoise Pétrovitch has produced one of the most powerful bodies of work on the French art scene. Amongst the numerous mediums that she has explored — ceramics, glass, ink washes, painting, print and video — drawing remains predominant. Pétrovitch’s art reveals an ambiguous world, playing with conventional boundaries and eluding any particular interpretation. Her universe is populated by children, teenagers or young people caught in actions whose meaning is not always comprehended. Animals or chimeras, flowers, and dark and mysterious landscapes are also part of her visual vocabulary. Intimacy, fragments of life and disappearance, alongside recurrent themes such as the double and the repetitive create suspended fluid and melancholic atmospheres sometimes echoing and reinterpreting various topics found throughout the history of art.
BIOGRAPHY
Françoise Pétrovitch was born in Paris in 1964. She lives and works in Verneuil-sur-Avre (FR). She has exhibited extensively both in France and abroad. The FHEL in Landernau (FR) hosted a major retrospective of her work and a monographic exhibition was dedicated to her at the BnF, Paris in 2022. 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 works for the Galerie des Enfants at the Centre Pompidou, the West Bund Museum, Shanghai and the Ballets du Nord Company. The artist is currently on view at the Musée de la Vie Romantique, Paris. Her works are included in many private and public collections, including the Centre Pompidou, Paris, 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), as well as numerous regional art centres and foundations throughout France. Pétrovitch is represented by Semiose Gallery.
