Françoise Pétrovitch awarded 2021 Contemporary Drawing Prize

Although they are not at the Salon du Dessin for the announcement of the Foundation’s 14th Drawing Prize, Florence and Daniel Guerlain have decided to stick to the usual calendar. Accordingly, on December 10, 2020, you were able to discover a film on the Foundation website presenting the members of the 2021 Jury and the 2021 selection of the three artists: Martin Dammann, German artist, born in 1965. Erik van Lieshout, Dutch artist, born in 1968. Françoise Pétrovitch, French artist, born in 1964.

Since the creation of the prize, the selection of artists has been made by a permanent committee of seven experts. This year, the Jury renewed for each edition, is comprised of: Doris Beyersdorf from Switzerland, Marcelo Roberto Ferro from Brazil, Christian Hausmaninger from Austria, Marlise Jozami from Argentina, Dominique Agostini, Matthieu de Boisseson, Jean Louis Milin and Florence & Daniel Guerlain from France.

The three artists were asked to present themselves to the jury members by making a video showing their works and commenting on them as they evolve in their studio. These videos can be watched on the Foundation website. On March 25, the jury and the artists met on Zoom, and following this meeting as usual, the Foundation legal adviser Maître Patricia Moyersoen collected the Jury’s votes. 

The laureate receives an endowment of 15,000 EUR and the two other selected artists 5,000 EUR each. A work by the winner will be offered to the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris by the Foundation.

Revisiting the classics of art history, Françoise Pétrovitch develops her subjects in an oscillating movement between past and present, the explicit and the implicit, which highlights the spontaneity of her execution and the fluidity of her washes.

Pétrovitch works a great deal in series. Lately, an island in her Série Noire paid homage to the Isle of the Dead, the famous painting by Arnold Böcklin, and to a park that she visited. This stood alongside the large portraits of young smokers, flowers and animals, all somewhat fantastical, in her corpus. The repeated themes make it possible to “bring forth a pleasure in making and doing.” The artist conceives small format pieces in pencil, while she works in ink and wash on large sheets of paper placed on the floor. Indeed, Pétrovitch’s material is very liquid, in the physical and metaphorical senses. Going from one medium to another, she likes her models to develop fluidly – even when they evoke the disappearance, absence or interiority of being, which are recurrent interrogations, as is clearly shown by the Saint Sebastian works, the floating bodies or the bistre and black multiples.

To counter the risk of nostalgia, Pétrovitch uses snapshots of everyday life. She goes for bold, clear breaks and lively tones, notably red. The important thing is to dig, again and again, deeper into pictorial questions… Extract from the text by Marie Maertens

Françoise Pétrovitch is represented by Galerie Semiose in Paris.

About the Drawing Prize
The prize receives the support of the Daniel & Florence Guerlain Foundation’s Cercle des Amis, La Maison Guerlain, Neuflize OBC, Artcurial,  Artprice by ArtMarket.com, Voisin Consulting Life Sciences, Groupe Élysées Monceau, Groupe Pasteur Mutualité, the Salon du Dessin, Beaux-Arts de Paris, Château Seguin, La Maison Champagne Ruinart, Vodka Beluga, Rova Caviar Madagascar.

Past winners: Silvia Bächli, Switzerland (2007), Sandra Vásquez de la Horra, Chile (2009), Catharina Van Eetvelde, Belgium (2010), Marcel Van Eeden, Netherlands (2011), Jorinde Voigt, Germany (2012), Susan Hefuna, Germany (2013), Tomasz Kowalski, Poland (2014), Jockum Nordström, Sweden (2015), Cameron Jamie, United States (2016), Ciprian Muresan, Romania (2017), Mamma Andersson, Sweden (2018), Claire Morgan, Ireland (2019), Juan Uslé, Spain (2020)