Frédérique Petit

For more than 30 years, Frédérique Petit created miniature rugs, often working alongside major textile artists such as Sheila Hicks. Then, in 2004, she began to explore new textile practices, notably embroidery. In 2008 and 2010, she visited Suzhou in China, to pursue her own researches. On returning to France she created the series Ombres Chinoises, whose long horizon lines animated by tiny landscape features embroidered in simple black on white offered a poetic evocation of her journey home from East to West. Her most recent works are minimalist reflections on color—combining the figurative elements of Ombres Chinoises with abstractions in a play of opposition and friction. Although important to the process, technique vanishes behind sensation, reflection and reverie. “With her needle and thread Frédérique Petit depicts and embodies the passage of time. The real time spent in the work, and the dream time of an imaginary travel to the other,” says Etienne Charry.

Since 1979, Frédérique Petit has had many solo and group shows both in France at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, in Paris and Lyon, and at various biennales, and abroad in South America, Japan, Indonesia, Thailand, Canada, the United States, Norway, Hungary, Poland, Italy, United Kingdom. Her work was notably featured in the travelling exhibition “Métissages,” a dialogue and collaboration between contemporary art and craft. Her work is in a range of public collections, and she has been awarded public commissions by the French Fonds National d'Art Contemporain and by the French Presidency.

Courtesy of Marie Finaz Gallery