Michel François (artist)

[1] Michel François took part in two key events in contemporary art, Documenta 9 in Kassel in 1992 and the 48th Venice Biennale, in 1999, where he represented Belgium alongside Ann Veronica Janssens with the installation Horror vacui.

[2] 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.

[1] In 2012, Michel François produced a personal exhibition at the CRAC Occitanie, Pièces à conviction, at the same time as he presented his works on paper at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

[7] 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.

Some of his most recent works also tend to hide the artist behind seemingly natural processes of transformation of the matter (as in the slow erosion of saltrock by water drops), which is also the creation of the artwork:[8] "We must recognize that it is a project, that of a museum invaded by living things that are developing".