A highlight of the beginning of the year, the session organised by the PIASA Editions Department on Wednesday 12 March 2020 is pleased to present a selection of some of the most significant artists of the second half of the 20th century.
Blending with great harmony the diversity of the artistic scenes (Europe, United States, Asia...), the corpus gives an important place to contemporary creation. If for a long time Françoise Petrovitch expressed herself mainly through painting and drawing, her plastic itinerary pushed her to explore other techniques such as, from the beginning of the 2000s, ceramics, engraving and even video.
Over the years, the theme of intimacy has stood out from the others and appears at the centre of her works. The characters who populate these spaces are often beings situated on the borderline between childhood and adulthood. A polysemic symbol of fragility and innocence, childhood allows the artist to evoke the human faults that are probed, relentlessly, in an eminently moving manner.
As curator François Michaud points out in a book published in 2014, "In the assembly of boys and girls who inhabit his recent paintings, an ambiguous form of Arcadia emerges, a world on the edge of the living and the conscious, always on the lookout for a subtle deviation.
The artist is very attached to the book as an object. She has produced several artists' books, including Ne bouge pas bouge poupée with Hervé Plumet, as well as several editorial projects for children.
Françoise Petrovitch (born in 1964)
Quand la forêt s'éclaircit et retiennent ses animaux en elle, 2014
Panorama composed of 4 aluminium panels applied with canson paper
printed and enhanced with silk-screen printing 12 exemplaires Editions Bernard Chauveau (D) : 200 x 400 cm
Estimation :6000 / 8000 euros
As can be seen in the present silkscreen print published in 12 copies by Bernard Chauveau and measuring 2 by 4 metres, the artist favours very imposing formats. The experience she proposes to the spectators is immersive. Initially produced in watercolour, this work was printed on Canson paper.
Subsequently, all of the animals were added in silkscreen printing by varying the colours and locations. It is offered for sale with an estimate of between 6,000 and 8,000 euros. Since the end of the 1990s, Françoise Petrovitch's work has been the subject of several major exhibitions, such as in 2008 at the Musée d'Art Moderne de Saint-Étienne and in 2011 at the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature in Paris.
