Michel Francois

Michel Francois works with installation, sculpture, video, photography, and printed matter to create artworks that dispute the artist’s hand. Economical materials such as cardboard, Mylar, or wire are precariously balanced, sublimely fragile yet burdened by their arrangement. His works stretch into the space of the viewer—be it a cactus garden or an impenetrable grid armature, and assert their openness. The spectator must often resist an overt temptation to touch or step inside the artworks—suggestions the artist offers with a smirk. His works often mutate as they are displayed in different places or amid different works, and he considers the exhibition to be an opportunity to present novels connections or conclusions. Francois’s capacity for contemplating these unsettled objects has led to a number of collaborations with choreographers and theaters in Belgium, maintaining his interest in the way in which a space might alter the reading of an object.

Francois has exhibited at institutions including Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, Centre de Création Contemporaine, Tours, France, IAC, Villeurbanne, France, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne, Switzerland, SMAK, Ghent, Macba, Barcelona, Centre George Pompidou, Paris, Fondation Miro, Barcelona, Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland, and Witte De With, Rotterdam, among many others. He represented Belgium at the Venice Biennale in 1999 with Veronica Janssens, and participated in the Istanbul Biennial (1996) and dOCUMENTA IX in Kassel (1992).