The Door Opener
The 7th edition of the BMW Art Guide by INDEPENDENT COLLECTORS takes you to more than 304 collections in 51 countries and 224 cities.
Since its creation in 2009, the Fondation Francès has been showcasing the Francès art contemporary in the setting of an old Senlis house. Since 2023, the Fondation opened a new space to the public in Clichy, a former factory entirely renovated offering a new setting for the collection.
Created by Estelle and Hervé Francès, the eponymous foundation is conceived as a laboratory for critical thinking around a collection of nearly 800 international contemporary works, open to all artistic expressions. Built up as the couple's discoveries unfolded, the collection revealed a common thread - “Human and his excesses” - and became a source of inspiration and firm convictions. Between resistance and generosity, the foundation's primary aim is to promote access to contemporary art, particularly in a region that has long been deprived of it.
In 2024, the foundation celebrates its fifteenth anniversary through a double group exhibition in Clichy named XXH.
XXH is an artistic odyssey into the heart of the eXtra-eXtra-Human, a fascinating world where art meets psychoanalysis to unravel the mysteries of the human being. Through a dynamic and provocative collection, the Fondation Francès confronts us with our impulses, desires, and excesses, offering a compelling reflection on identity, mortality, and the struggle between the forces of life and death that drive us. XXH refers to the extra-human, describing the individual, their body, and emotions, but also their sometimes-extreme impulses. XXH questions the complexity of the very experience of the human condition.
XXH is also the title of the Fondation Francès's first retrospective exhibition in 2013, at the Museum Dr Guislain in Ghent. For its fifteenth anniversary, the Foundation naturally wishes to re-examine its collection and its main theme. XXH thus explores every aspect of our human condition, reinvesting essential subjects such as identity, intimacy, spirituality, the fragility of our existence but also violence, war, rebellion, and struggle. XXH exalts the human to the extreme, reflecting the complexity of our existence. Like the collection and its commitments, XXH is the scene of a struggle against indifference, exclusion, and incomprehension. It is the site of a sensitive, open dialogue, turned towards the society, with the artwork as its principal mediator.
The 7th edition of the BMW Art Guide by INDEPENDENT COLLECTORS takes you to more than 304 collections in 51 countries and 224 cities.