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.

Amélie Bertrand presents a solo exhibition, Neon Club, at the Musée de Valence in 2026. 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).

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, 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: at the Louvre Lens (2018); in the Fonds Hélène et Édouard Leclerc in Landerneau and the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris (2022); the Musée de la Vie romantique, Paris (2023); the Jenisch Museum, Vevey, the Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris, and the MO.CO, Montpellier (2025). 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 took 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).

Going under a pseudonym borrowed from a character in an American comedy show, Ernest T. is a French artist whose work is in line with Dadaism and the Incoherents. His oeuvre, takes a swipe at the heavily coded and overwhelmingly serious world of contemporary art, in a subversive and conceptual manner. Through the use of misappropriation, image manipulation and even plagiarism, enhanced by linguistic games and caricatured drawings, the artist examines the world of art from the perspective of its moral turpitude, greed and other pretentions.

Ernest T. began his artistic experimentation in the 1960s with a collection of small, comic calendars, which eventually ended up as a series under the name Dessins français (French Drawings). During the 1980s, he created his pseudonym and began to work on his well-known series Peintures nulles (Useless Paintings), which he envisaged as ‘Painting Degree Zero’. In reaction to the phenomenon of the idolization of the artist, which valued the signature more than the work itself, Ernest T. produced a number of paintings where his signature took over the whole canvas. These works followed a protocol in which capital ‘T’s, painted in three primary colors, dovetail with each other in the manner of Penrose tiling, where letters of the same color never touch each other. These narcissistic arrangements are integrated into offbeat sketches that mock the legitimization processes of art as well as other practices linked with the signature of a work, its authenticity, its hidden meanings, etc.

Ernest T’s works are included in the collections of the Musée national d'art moderne - Pompidou Center (FR), the CNAP, Paris (FR), the MAMCO in Geneva (CH), the IAC Villeurbanne and numerous regional contemporary art centers across France.

Xie Lei chose painting through personal conviction, as it opens up a pathway towards a language capable of expressing his sensory universe and a field of experimentation that allows him to delve into the specificity of this medium in the contemporary world. His work always starts with a basis in reality before taking flight to explore uncertain or ambiguous realms that are transformed by his imagination. Most of his paintings refer to murky or disturbing situations, discreetly linked to literary or cinematographic memories or drawn from a profound crucible of personal emotions. His work dwells on the complexity of events and situations and above all their ambiguity and the tensions they foster. His recent painting intrigues through its exploration of a world in-between sleep and death. The colors are somber but shift towards the luminous and the powerful. Xie Lei’s painting is singular in that it offers up an alternative perception of time: in a salutary manner, it suggests a slowing of the spectator’s gaze and an escape from the intoxicating world of immediacy and constant acceleration. 

Xie Lei (b. 1983 in China) has lived and worked in Paris since 2006. He graduated from the CAFA in Beijing then the ENSBA in Paris. He is the winner of the 2025 Marcel Duchamp Prize. His works have been exhibited in numerous institutions: Louis Vuitton Foundation, Paris (FR); MO.CO, Montpellier (FR); CAPC, Bordeaux (FR); Villa Noailles, Hyères (FR); Collection Lambert, Avignon (FR); MAC VAL, Vitry-sur-Seine (FR); Langen Foundation, Neuss (DE); Musée National d’Histoire d’Immigration, Paris (FR); Ricard Foundation, Paris (FR). His oeuvres feature in many collections such as the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, MAC VAL, Albertina Museum and X Museum. Xie Lei was resident at the Casa de Velázquez, Madrid (2020-2021) and at the Villa Medici, Roma (2024).