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Françoise Pétrovitch
Étendu
Abbaye Royale de Fontevraud
June 3 - September 18, 2022
Specially created for the Abbaye Royale de Fontevraud, Françoise Pétrovitch unfurls a series of original drawings in the choir of the abbey. Immense or small, even minuscule, they are at one with the thousand-year-old stones. The inks she applies saturate the paper, which then comes to life, sculpting a universe of sublime figures that includes her “stretched out” Étendus which are exhibited around the alter, alongside the recumbent statues of the Plantagenet tombs.
In the words of Camille Morineau, co-curator of the major retrospective that the Hélène and Édouard Leclerc collection recently devoted to Françoise Pétrovitch, “What is astonishing about her work, is that her drawing rapidly develops a three-dimensional quality: the figures emerge from their supports and become sculptures, occupying their space on the walls and the architecture itself, becoming theatrical sets and then films…”
The semi-conscious state evoked by the Plantagenet recumbents, believed to be awaiting their final judgement, provides a striking echo to Françoise Pétrovitch’s work. Her large-format, stretched out figures, which she has entitled the Étendus, also seem to linger in an interminable state. A kind of torpor that characterizes endless waiting on the threshold. The artist conjures a solemn lightness with these drawings, evoking a suspension of time that correlates with that of the recumbents.
Other motifs are placed in the alcoves or where stones are absent, in the chapels that radiate from the ambulatory. Partial or whole, human or animal bodies seem, in a dreamlike manner, to emerge from the tuffeau stone itself.
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. The FHEL in Landernau (FR) is hosting a major retrospective of her work and a monographic exhibition will follow 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 a number of 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 in Saint-Etienne (FR) and in Strasbourg (FR), the MAC VAL (FR) and numerous regional art centers throughout France as well as the Salomon and Guerlain Foundations.
