Michel François

Michel François (; born 1956 in Saint-Trond) is a Belgian conceptual artist.

Biography

Born in a family of artists, Michel François studied theatre then graduated from the École de Recherche Graphique in Brussels.

Since the start of his career as an artist in the early 1980s, he exhibited his work throughout Europe, the United States, Mexico, Brazil, and Japan.

The first monographic and retrospective exhibition of the artist, at a key moment in his career, took place ten years later, in 2009, with Plans d'évasion, organized by SMAK Ghent and the Institut d'art contemporain de Villeurbanne.

Michel François has exhibited his work widely across Europe. Since 2009, he has taught at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and also collaborates regularly with choreographers (Pierre Droulers, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker). In 1985 he met Ann Veronica Janssens, with whom he lived and worked for some 30 years, before separating. Their daughter, Léone François, is a Belgian actress.

Work

His art explores a variety of media including installation, video, sculpture and photography. The materials of his work can be either man-made (glass, bricks, gypsum, aluminium foil, polystyrene, newspapers) or natural (leaves, cactus, water, dandelions). The objects that he manipulates assume figurative and dynamic functions.

Through all these objects, Michel François establishes a network of correspondences, echoes and analogies which creates an overall coherence rather than defining a style:

Xavier Hufkens has likened his work to the Arte Povera school, for the way Michel François turns simple and everyday objects into carriers of meaning, which varies according to context and juxtaposition. "We must recognize that it is a project, that of a museum invaded by living things that are developing".