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.

Born in Versailles in 1980, Laurent Proux lives and works in Paris. In his painting and drawing, Laurent Proux produces powerful and original imagery that seeks through his formal choices to resolve the questions raised by his subjects. Described by some as a realist due to the subjects he depicts—industrial machinery, workstations, sexualized bodies, etc.­—his style finds its emancipation through his never-ending exploration of pictorial solutions, the integration of aberrations, bringing planes into collision, the use of artificial colors, all freeing his oeuvre from the opposition between figuration and abstraction. He approaches the human form through fragments, exaggeration and the use of silhouettes to create a kind of body-cum-machine, politicized and under assault, often disturbing and occasionally sentimental. His canvases take the form of a stage, in an altered perspective and the artist addresses the spectator with a visual and intellectual enigma running through the image.

Laurent Proux’s first institutionnal solo exhibition is taking place at the Musée de l’Abbaye in Saint-Claude (FR) in 2025. His oeuvres are included in the collections of the National Center for Visual Arts (CNAP), the Occitan, Limousin and Nouvelle-Aquitaine regional contemporary art collections (FRAC) and the Paris Municipal Collection (FMAC). His work has been exhibited at the Mana Contemporary in Chicago (US), the Shanghai Art Museum (CN), the Moscow Center for Contemporary Art (RU), the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Lyon (FR), the Limousin FRAC in Limoges (FR), at the Lieu Commun in Toulouse (FR) and at the Musée d'Art moderne et contemporain de l'Abbaye Sainte-Croix aux Sables-d'Olonne (FR). Laurent Proux was a resident of the Casa de Velázquez in Madrid (ES).

The African-American artist Philemona Williamson (b. 1951) brings together personal and more universal narratives in her brightly colored, large format paintings that portray children and teenagers, often in mysterious situations. She paints directly onto her canvases without preliminary sketches and her paintings thus resemble palimpsests telling their own stories, with multiple layers, figures and scenes appearing across the support, before seemingly being abandoned. Williamson’s works are deeply rooted in her childhood memories and include references to memorabilia, such as dolls typical of American popular culture from the artist’s personal collection, and as such are an invitation to explore mysterious and unfinished tales.

Williamson has been exhibited in numerous American institutions, from her debut solo show at the Queens Museum of Art in 1988, to Metaphorical Narratives, at the Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey, in 2017, which spanned the thirty years of her artistic career. Her works can be seen in many public collections across the USA and she has been commissioned for several public projects, most notably by the New York Metropolitan Transport Authority. In 2022, she was one of fifteen recipients of the Anonymous Was A Woman prize, awarded annually since 1986 to women artists over the age of 40, in recognition of their previous and future work.

Moffat Takadiwa creates large format sculptures from materials found on garbage dumps, notably computer parts, plastic bottle-caps, toothbrushes and toothpaste tubes. After gathering great quantities of these objects and sorting them by color and shape, the artist weaves these discarded scraps into rich wall hangings. Once suspended, these post-industrial fabrics, through their intricate beauty, acquire an aura of ritual or totemic artifacts.

Born in 1983, Moffat Takadiwa lives and works on the outskirts of Harare in Mbare, one of the largest recycling centers in the country and an important hub for the informal economy. Belonging to the post-independence generation, his work reflects his preoccupation with issues such as consumerism, inequality, post-colonialism and the environment. Since the earliest days of his artistic career, he has used his practice as a platform for the rehabilitation of his community, working with young local artists and designers, with a view to founding the world first artistic center based on the use of reclaimed materials.

The National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Harare, staged a major solo exhibition of Moffat Takadiwa in 2023. In 2024, he had his first solo exhibition in a French institution at the Galerie Édouard Manet, Gennevilliers, and represents Zimbabwe at the 60^th Biennale di Venezia alongside five other artists. He exhibited his works in major institutions abroad as well, most notably at the Craft Contemporary (US), during the exhibition organized by Jeffrey Deitch and Gagosian at the Moore Building in Miami (US), at the ARoS Kunstmuseumat, Aarhus (DK), the MACAAL, Marrakesh (MA) and the Arnhem Museum (NL).

By means of her impeccably smooth execution, Amélie Bertrand (born in 1985) is able to distance herself from ideal landscapes inspired by nature, and shape decors that fall somewhere between dreams and nightmares. The planes and surfaces of her works are assembled in a complex and meticulous manner, branching out into skewed perspectives and shallow horizons. All kinds of materials and motifs typical of our era saturate her compositions: OSB, laminates, wire mesh, tiles, fleecing, chains, foliage, camouflage etc. Colors are applied in gradients, yet always as a single layer, as if trapped on the surface of an impenetrable screen. Amélie Bertrand creates an atmosphere of déjà-vu, a contemporary ambience that is both psychological and physical within the confined space of the painting. As the missing link between Giotto and West Coast art, Amélie Bertrand combines the great traditions with synthetic psychedelia, transforming contemporary visual culture into carefully controlled constructs of flat tints.

In 2024, a monographic exhibition of Amélie Bertrand took place at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris. She has recently enjoyed solo and group exhibitions at the Centre d’art contemporain de la Matmut-Daniel Havis, Saint-Pierre-de-Varengeville (FR), the Maison des arts, Malakoff (FR), the Centre d’art contemporain de Meymac (FR), the Kunstwerk Carlshütte, Büdelsdorf (DE), the Ecole Municipale des Beaux-Arts, Châteauroux and the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dole (FR). Her oeuvres are included in public and private collections such as the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, the MAC VAL, Vitry-sur-Seine (FR), the CNAP, Paris (FR), the FRAC Limousin, Limoges (FR), Les Abattoirs Musée – Frac Occitanie Toulouse (FR) and the Musée de l’Abbaye Sainte Croix, Les Sables-d’Olonne (FR).

Anne Neukamp’s art befuddles the viewer’s gaze through its critical interrogation of the media scene of our times. In obfuscating and hybridizing the symbols employed by the communications sector, her paintings empty them of any capacity to clarify or convey information. More playful or mischievous than deceptive, they oblige the viewer to reconsider his or her image-reading habits. Thus, removed from their original sense, these motifs seem on the verge of capitulation in the quasi-monochrome swathes of color that surround them. Anne Neukamp draws on a great variety of registers and techniques—oil, egg-tempera and acrylic—and is at ease bringing together diverse traditions on the same canvas. The implicit meanings and figurative associations scattered across her paintings encourage us to place our trust in the intelligence of her conceptual approach, without ever abandoning contemplation, in in its most fundamental sense.

Born in 1976, Anne Neukamp lives and works in Berlin. She graduated from the School of Fine Arts in Dresden, where she now teaches, and has also taken part in the international residency program of the ISCP in New York. Her works have been widely exhibited at the Léopold Hoesch Museum in Düren and the Ludwig Museum in Budapest (2023), at the Beaux-Arts de Paris (as part of the exhibition We Paint! in 2022), at the University of the Arts | Rosenwald Wolf Gallery in Philadelphia (2018), at the KW in Berlin and the Kunstverein in Oldenburg (2013), as well as at the Palais de Tokyo for the fifth Jean-François Prat Prize (2016). Her works figure in numerous private and public collections, most notably at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rennes, the Rochechouart Museum, the Société Générale Collection, and those of the Bredin-Prat Endowment Fund and Moulin Family Endowment Fund – Lafayette Anticipations.

Sébastien Gouju manipulates elements of popular culture, misappropriating objects as familiar as the wine pitcher, the potted palm or decorative ceramic objects, clichés from the domestic world that we readily describe as kitsch. Using techniques derived from handicrafts such as earthenware glazing, embroidery, lace making and metal or leatherwork, the artist explores a world of incongruous hybrids and collisions of meaning and form. Once reconfigured, these elements take on the form of images that offer up narratives, sometimes lighthearted and occasionally frightening, situated at the crossroads of everyday life and the fabulous. Sébastien Gouju casts an amused and subversive eye over the world of decorative arts and dynamites the aesthetic qualities of everyday life and the decors that modern man has created for himself.

Sébastien Gouju's works have recently been included in exhibitions at Abbaye Royale de Fontevraud, Fontevraud (FR), Le Cylop, Milly-la-Forêt (FR), La Galerie – Centre d'art contemporain, Noisy-le-Sec (FR), Fondation Villa Datris, Isle-sur-la-Sorgue (FR), FRAC Nouvelle-Aquitaine MÉCA, Bordeaux (FR), FRAC–Artothèque Limousin, Limoges (FR) and Abbaye Saint André, Centre d’Art Contemporain, Meymac (FR). In 2018, Sébastien Gouju was part of the Artist Residency program of the Hermès Corporate Foundation.
His works is held in the collections of the FRAC Alsace, Sélestat (FR), FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Reims (FR), Centre national des arts plastiques (CNAP), Paris (FR), Collection HBK Saar, Sarrebrück (DE), Collection of the City of Diddeleng (LU), Musée de l'image, Épinal (FR), Colas Fondation, Paris (FR) and the artothèques (art lending centers) of Pessac, Caen, Auxerre and Strasbourg (FR).

With a background in printing, Hugo Capron's painting is based on the pleasure of reproducing the same image in long series that seek to exhaust all the possibilities of variation. His paintings are generally produced in one go and without repentance, but are nevertheless based on precise technical equations. Long interested in the correspondences between a volume of paint and a surface of canvas to be covered, his return from the Kujoyama Villa in 2019 led to a breaking point. His works began to represent subjects that were often classical and anonymous, borrowed from the history of etching or the history of painting.

Hugo Capron’s palettes are the result of fine investigations among suppliers from all over the world in search of the most accurate shades. On the canvas, they reveal themselves in a whole range of materials, juices and luminous extra thickness which emphasise the speed of execution. The gesture is almost calligraphic, it is a mixture of commas and loops.

Hugo Capron (b. 1989) lives and works in Dijon (FR). He graduated from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Art et de Design, Dijon (FR). In 2021, he is the winner of the 8th edition of the Emerige Revelation Grant. His work has been exhibited in numerous individual and collective shows at the Hôtel des Arts, Toulon (FR), the Centre Régional d’Art Contemporain de Montbéliard (FR), the Collection Yvon Lambert, Avignon (FR), the Frac Bourgogne, Dijon (FR) and at Consortium, Dijon (FR). His work features in a large number of French and international, public and private collections.

Laurent Le Deunff’s sculptures often mislead the eye due to the disparity between the materials used and the objects represented. He has a pronounced taste for traditional techniques from the world of arts and crafts as well as decorative artifices. The modesty of papier-mâché and fingernail clippings rubs shoulders with the nobility of bronze and deer antlers, and the rarity of fossilized dinosaur droppings sits side-by-side with the ordinariness of fake wood made from cement. Le Deunff’s meticulousness and acute sense of observation have also been deployed in his series of drawings—copulating animals, the footprints of imaginary monsters or artist’s cats—through which he explores animality, in a narrative that leaves plenty of space for the imagination. His bestiary brings together a wide variety of creatures—dolphins, slugs, seahorses or bears—without any hint of hierarchy of species. Humans are not excluded from the narrative, which reactivates a kind of archetypal primitivism: a prehistoric phallus and various totems and talismans transport civilization back to its most splendid origins.

His works have been the subject of exhibitions at Biennale Gherdëina, Val Gardena, Dolomites (IT), at Portique, Le Havre (FR), at MASC, Sables d’Olonne (FR), at MRAC Occitanie, Sérignan (FR), at La Halle des Bouchers, Vienne (FR), at Carré Scène nationale, Château-Gontier (FR), at Artspace Boan, Séoul (KR), at Museum Beelden aan Zee, La Haye (NL), at PAV Parco Arte Vivente, Turin (IT), at LAMAG, Municipal Art Gallery, Los Angeles (US), at MOCO, Montpellier (FR), at Musée d’Art Moderne Paris (FR) and at numerous FRAC. Laurent Le Deunff’s work is held in the collections of the Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris (FR), MRAC Occitanie, Sérignan (FR), CAPC, Bordeaux (FR), and in the collections of the FRAC of Paris, Bordeaux, Limoges and Caen (FR).

Within their practice, Gert and Uwe Tobias have revived a wide range of traditional image-making techniques—woodcut printing, low-relief sculpture, drawing using typewriters, watercolor, gouache, ceramics and lacemaking—into which they breathe new life using contemporary means. Their oeuvre is mainly influenced by the myths, costumes, crafts and commonplace motifs of their native Transylvania, subverted and fused with elements of popular culture, abstract art and contemporary graphic design. From this rich pictorial repertoire, they create a varied body of work in which legends and folk tales, carnivalesque figures and archaic elements are subject to constant metamorphoses.

Born in Romania in 1973, the twin brothers Gert and Uwe Tobias have been developing a collaborative practice since 2001. Their four-handed work bears witness to the perfect symbiosis of their individual gestures, striving towards a common goal. Today, they live and work in Cologne, Germany. The twin brothers have recently enjoyed exhibitions at the MoMA in New York, the Sprengel Museum in Hannover and the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, both in Germany, The Dhondt-Dhaenens Museum in Deurle, Belgium, the Whitechapel Gallery in London, the Kunstmuseum Ravensburg, Germany, the Kupferstichkabinett at the Staatliche Kunstsammelungen in Dresden, the Maramotti Collection in Reggio Emilia in Italy and the UCLA, Hammer Museum of Art in Los Angeles as well as many other venues. In 2022, they were awarded the Prix du Dessin (Drawing Prize) by the Fondation d’Art Contemporain Daniel et Florence Guerlain.

Stefan Rinck’s stone figures form a motley and comical community of, for the most part, animals, chimeras and monsters. They wear costumes and masks; are endowed with particular symbols or characteristics, some bear the names of heroes of Greek mythology or of legend. Rinck’s sculpted figures make up a discordant but related assembly of non-humans: they come from elsewhere, an archaic imaginary world, woven from myths and legends. With his collection of fauna, the artist is exploring a comical, imaginary yet realistic vein, breathing new life into its iconography, using a technique typical of the Middle Ages: sculpting his figures directly from stone.

Rinck’s sculptures remind us of the figures of Roman art, which populate the columns and tympana of churches. They share the same morphology and style, the hybrid aspect of the chimera and monster. These are grotesque figures, in which we recognize the vitalist comedy typical of medieval realism which could be observed during the parades of jesters and buffoons at religious and popular festivities. Yet if the Middle Ages seem to color Rinck’s art, its frame of reference in fact crystalizes around a number of “Gothic” obsessions of the Romantic kind: a taste for mythology and folk tales, for different epochs and cultures for the fantastic or figures of hubris and excess.

Stefan Rinck’s work has been subject to many exhibitions in Athens, Berlin, Brussels, Los Angeles, Madrid, Munich, Paris and features in the collections of the Frac Corse, Corte, (FR), the CBK Rotterdam (NL) and the Museum De Hallen, Haarlem (NL). In 2018, the work The mangust of Beauvais is installed permanently in the city of Paris at 53-57 rue de Grennelle (Beaupassage). In 2019, Stefan Rinck is part of the 100 Sculptors of Tomorrow published by Thames & Hudson.

More abstract than CoBrA, more colorful than Joyce Pensato, Aneta Kajzer’s work sits assuredly in the ranks of Bad Painting. It eschews the normative concepts of the image, alternating between seriousness and humor and daringly treading the borderline between beauty and ugliness. Her deformed, diverse and sometimes-contradictory figures allow the spectator some insight into the artist’s social preoccupations: it is of no consequence if some things remain unresolved, as long as they exist. Her artistic process begins with her choice of colors and strokes, from which at first transitory forms emerge that constantly evolve before finally taking on their definitive shapes. In constant dialog with the motifs that appear on her canvases, Kajzer alternates between planned and intuitive gestures. She creates conflicting arrangements between abstraction and figuration, combining contradictory forms of expression. Often a perfectly placed comma of paint resolves the conundrum of the image as a whole, making full use of the phenomena of pareidolia and suggestive association.

Aneta Kajzer was born in 1989 in Katowice in Poland and lives and works in Berlin. She graduated from the Kunsthochschule Mainz and was awarded a residency at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. In 2018, she participated in the Goldrausch Künstlerinnenprojekt, a development program for female visual artists. Her work is regularly exhibited, particularly in shows dedicated to the contemporary rejuvenation of German art such as Now ! Painting in Germany Today in Deutschland, shown at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Kunstsammlung Chemnitz and Museum Wiesbaden in 2019-2020. She has also enjoyed numerous solo exhibitions, most notably at the Conrads Gallery in Düsseldorf, the Künstlerhaus Bethanien and the Institut für Moderne Kunst in Nuremburg.