This summer, MO.CO. Montpellier Contemporain presents monographic exhibitions of two essential artists of the French art scene: Françoise Pétrovitch at MO.CO. and Jean-Marie Appriou at MO.CO. Panacée. At the same time, the exhibition of MO.CO. Esba's 2025 graduates, curated by Sophie Lapalu, will be held within the remarkable heritage site of Montpellier's Faculty of Medicine.

Born in 1964 in Chambéry, Françoise Pétrovitch has, since the 1990s, developed a prolific body of work drawing on numerous media and techniques, such as ceramics, bronze, video, painting, ink wash and drawing. In constant dialogue with the artists who came before her, she takes up the traditional subjects of art history — portraits, landscapes and still lifes — and bends them to a new reading of the world, marked by an absence of hierarchy.

The ambivalent universes she creates, populated by a galaxy of living beings — from animals to plants to the vast diversity of humankind — play on paradoxical atmospheres that shift between the visible and the invisible, clarity and darkness, the unaltered and the hybrid. This porosity of boundaries allows Françoise Pétrovitch to place at the heart of her work questions of intimacy, the fragment, the double, disappearance, solitude, transition and cruelty.

The MO.CO. exhibition is resolutely ambitious. Designed in close collaboration with the artist, it covers the full range of media and themes in her work, down to her relationship with staging, and brings together nearly 130 works created between 1994 and 2025. Some of these, notably from the 1990s, will be shown to the public for the first time, while around thirty were produced specifically for this project.

https://www.moco.art/fr