International
“Making artworks dialogue to illuminate what moves through us and connects us.” As an exhibition commissioner, collector and independent cultural entrepreneur, Estelle Francès Lasserre has been co-founder and director of the Francès Foundation since 2009. Her curatorial approach is built at the intersection of the intimate and the collective. Attentive to artists’ narratives and the emotional weight of artworks, she creates exhibitions that question the challenges of our society and open perspectives on the human condition. Narrative, transmission and mediation extend this dialogue, inviting each person to experience, to question and to shift their perspective. In 2006, she founded ARROI, a cultural engineering agency, to place art and sensitivity at the heart of business strategies. She continues her commitment to emerging creation with the Françoise association for contemporary work, created in 2015. Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters since 2013, she was a member of the jury for the Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2015 and 2024. She also participates in acquisition and creation support commissions, notably with the Pompidou Centre, the DRAC, the CNAP and the Frac Picardie.
Exhibition Curator, Fondation Francès Clichy & Senlis
On the occasion of the Bicentenary of Photography, the Francès Foundation presents FAIRE CORPS, an exhibition of emblematic photographs from the Francès collection. FAIRE CORPS is labeled ‘Bicentenary of Photography’ by the Ministry of Culture.
Exhibition Curator, Fondation Francès Clichy & Senlis
Everything is political! Rather than assigning artworks an immediate activist function, the exhibition invites us to consider the way they seize upon social and historical contexts to reveal a political dimension, which resides less in their form than in the viewer’s gaze.
Exhibition Curator, Fondation Francès Clichy
The exhibition explores the raw energy that emerges from the fissure, from unfulfilled desire and torment. A reflection on our era: through these works, an interrogation takes shape concerning the human condition, its doubts and tensions. Whether it is social upheaval or more intimate preoccupations, this exhibition captures the echo of a world in perpetual metamorphosis.
Exhibition Curator, Fondation Francès Clichy
In 2024, the foundation celebrates its fifteenth anniversary with a rich program, organized around major events: XXH, a double collective exhibition exploring the eXtra-eXtra-Human, whose first part focuses on the individual, examining the complexity of the human condition, the desires and impulses that drive us. The second part places the individual at the heart of society and history, exploring collective movements and overflows, the confrontations and resistances opposed to them.
Exhibition Curator, Fondation Francès Clichy
I AM NOT WHAT YOU SEE OF ME
An exhibition articulated around multiple perspectives on the body, gender, and identity. Starting from an installation created by Ashley Hans Scheirl and Jakob Lena Knebl, it relays discursive perspectives, highlighting expressions of body and gender negotiated at the margins of frameworks imposed by heteronormative and heterosexist societies.
Exhibition Curator, Fondation Francès, Senlis
Kader Attia addresses the themes of memory, repair, and erasure. He draws from the archives of history, the flaws of humanity, and his personal narratives. He extracts and reveals traumas in order to then valorize and repair them. A thoughtful definition of repair in a society obsessed with erasure—that of a scar, a wrinkle, a trauma, or a conflict—which amounts to denying the existence of these traces that constitute the very singularity of our humanity.
Exhibition Curator, Société Générale, Paris-La Défense
The exhibition explores the connections between artistic and historical heritage through the motif of rope. Found in Romanian architecture and traditions, rope symbolises strength and protection; when braided, it evokes unity and cultural interweaving. Both practical and decorative, it is used to measure wood in traditional crafts and brings a sense of warmth. It also recalls the umbilical cord, a symbol of birth and hope. With its universal resonance, rope thus connects, visibly or implicitly, the men and women depicted by the artists.
Seven artists from the contemporary Romanian art scene : Radu Belcin, Mircea Cantor, Oana Farcas, Adrian Ghenie, Flavia Pitis, Mircea Suciu et Bogdan Vladuta.
Exhibition Curator, Fondation Francès, Senlis
Deeply imbued with environmental and ecological concerns, Claire Morgan questions our way of consuming and behaving in relation to the world around us.
Exhibition Curator, Fondation Francès, Senlis
In a refined mise en scène, Mircea Cantor addresses with utmost subtlety the question of the trace left by physical and mental memory. Through a dual reading, so characteristic of his work, both aesthetic and critical, Mircea Cantor seizes the space from which he brings forth the realities of a delicate line to reveal our humanity and critique our society, its mass consumption, its economic models.
Exhibition Curator, Fondation Francès, Senlis
The exhibition is dedicated to Dutch artist Erwin Olaf. It addresses his work in two parts, one devoted to aesthetics, the other to human comedy. Light in Erwin Olaf’s photographs is essential. It directs the gestures and attitudes of the characters and contributes to the revelation of expressions. It surrounds them with an aura that projects emotions to the viewer’s gaze.
Exhibition Curator, Fondation Francès, Senlis
Through painting or sculpture, Gavin Turk recycles the work of his predecessors, icons of modern art such as Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, and Jasper Johns. He plays with art history, revisits its codes, questions the myth of the artist, and more broadly, the ways of life in our society. The recycling of these remnants of humanity brings value to what no longer has any, highlights men and objects that are ignored, and restores meaning to what is excluded. These contemporary works deal with abandonment, that of a man or an object, the abandonment of oneself.
Exhibition Curator, Fondation Francès, Senlis
From the birth of a Foundation, “Dead or Alive?” is an exhibition that lives up to its name. No detours, a succession of strong emotions, memorable surprises. An exhibition that brings together artists from Russia, Guatemala, Austria, the Netherlands and the United States. An exhibition that is first and foremost about each of us, about our relationship with Life… and everything that follows.