Jean Dubuffet @ Pace Gallery, NYC - "The Hourloupe Cycle" Major Exhibition

Jean Dubuffet

The Hourloupe Cycle

Pace Gallery, New York

March 13 – April 26, 2025

Pace Gallery presents a major exhibition of works from Jean Dubuffet’s celebrated Hourloupe cycle. On view at the gallery’s 540 West 25th Street location in New York, the exhibition has been conceived to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Fondation Dubuffet last year.

It brings together a selection of important paintings, sculptures, and architectural models from public and private collections, including the monumental canvas Nunc Stans—among the largest paintings that Jean Dubuffet ever created—on loan from the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

One of the great innovators of post-war European painting, Jean Dubuffet looked to the margins of society—to the art of outsiders, mediums, the incarcerated, and the institutionalized—to liberate his own creativity. He coined the term “Art Brut” to describe the raw aesthetic of such outsiders, challenging the conventions of the period. Ahead of his time as both an artist and a philosopher, Dubuffet’s works posed fundamental questions about the nature of reality, leaving an indelible mark on the history of Modernism.

With the Hourloupe, Jean Dubuffet used his practice as a means to reinvent the everyday in an alternate world. He posited the parallel universe of the Hourloupe, which the viewer was invited to imaginatively inhabit, to critique the consensus of reality—as if one might step through a portal in the humdrum existence of waking life into an alternative space of fantasy and possibility. Pace gallery’s exhibition in New York showcases the dictionary of biomorphic forms that Jean Dubuffet invented as part of the Hourloupe’s visual language of experience and sensation. Charting the artist’s use of a recurring alphabet of forms across painting, sculpture, and architecture, the show reflects his lifelong effort to disrupt and refashion our modes of perception.

The Hourloupe cycle was the longest lasting series of Dubuffet’s career, comprising works created between 1962 and 1974. Pace, which has represented the artist since 1967, was the first American gallery to exhibit sculptures from L’Hourloupe in its inaugural exhibition of the artist’s work in 1968. A foundational figure in the gallery’s history, Jean Dubuffet has been the subject of more than 20 solo exhibitions at Pace over the course of seven decades.

The Hourloupe style emerged in the early 1960s from Dubuffet’s Paris Circus period, the result of casual experiments with felt-tip markers. Creating absent-minded doodles in red, black, and blue pen while chatting on the telephone, Jean Dubuffet arrived at a visual language resembling a web of meandering lines. These lines create interlocking shapes of negative space, which lock together like puzzle pieces. Over the course of more than ten years, he produced some of his best-known drawings, paintings, sculptures, and large-scale public environments in this style, comprising the cycle known as L’Hourloupe.

Anchoring Pace’s presentation is Nunc Stans (1965), a 26-foot-long painting on loan from the collection of the Guggenheim Museum in New York for the first time. This masterpiece of L’Hourloupe contains an inventory of characters and forms that recur throughout the cycle and the exhibition. The work’s title refers to the philosophical concept of eternity—the notion that there is no such thing as past and present, but only an eternal ‘now.’

“If Dubuffet teaches anything, it is that there are no conclusions, and no true beginnings,” the late critic Peter Schjeldahl once observed. “There is only the middle, the presentness of life.”

The exhibition also includes the 1966 painting Fusil Canardier, in which Jean Dubuffet reimagines a punt gun as an animated creature, suggesting the metamorphic powers of L’Hourloupe to render alive what was previously inanimate. This uncanniness is reflected in the more figurative sculptures from the cycle, three of which are on view at Pace exhibition. In these large-scale works, including L'Incivil (1973–2014) and Le Facetieux (1973–2014), faces and limbs are abstracted and contorted but, like Fusil Canardier, retain a sense of anatomical familiarity.

Sculpture and architecture were central to Dubuffet’s process in the Hourloupe cycle. He realized his sculptural works first in polystyrene, which he produced by cutting through the material with a hot wire, creating maquettes for forms that would then be realized at a larger scale. The exhibition at Pace features Banc-Salon (1974–2024), a hybrid between a sculpture and an architectural bench, on which visitors are welcomed to sit beneath a sculptural cloud suspended from above. The show also includes the original nine-by-12-foot model of Dubuffet’s monumental, habitable environment, the Jardin d'email (1968), which the artist realized for grounds of the Kröller-Müller Museum in the Netherlands in 1974 and remains on view today. These works are presented with two wall-mounted ceramic compositions from 1965, as well as Comptoir amoncelant (1968), a still life of a food-laden counter. Together, these works express the artist’s aim to transpose domestic and quotidian scenes from our reality into the parallel universe of L'Hourloupe.

Pace’s exhibition is presented in collaboration with the Fondation Dubuffet. Founded by the artist himself, the Fondation Dubuffet’s mission is to protect and promote the work of Jean Dubuffet.

JEAN DUBUFFET

Jean Dubuffet (b. 1901, Le Havre, France; d. 1985, Paris) believed that art must be part of ordinary life and sought artistic authenticity outside of established conventions and an annihilation of hierarchical values. Jean Dubuffet looked to the margins of the everyday—the art of incarcerated and institutionalized people, mediums, and isolated provincials—to liberate his own creativity, coining the term “art brut.” His interest in the tactile possibilities of abstract art, its texture and materiality, evolved early on with the use of media such as sand, glass, and tar—an employment of matter that characterized his work as well as the Art Informel movement of the 1940s and 50s. In keeping with his exploration of the quotidian, his use of line and color was redefined in his mature work of the 60s, dominated by his renowned Hourloupe series, the longest cycle of artwork in the artist’s oeuvre, which spanned twelve years from 1962 to 1974. Jean Dubuffet maintained an active career in his later years, prolifically creating paintings, works on paper, and monumental sculpture.

Jean Dubuffet’s work has been featured in over 400 solo exhibitions throughout the world, including over thirty traveling exhibitions. He has been the subject of numerous retrospectives at institutions including the Museum of Fine Arts, Dallas (1966); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1973, 1981); Kunst Foreningen Copenhagen (1988); National Museum of History, Taipei, Taiwan (1998); and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Deoksugung, South Korea (2006). Notable recent exhibitions include Metamorphoses of Landscape, Fondation Beyeler, Riehen, Switzerland (2016); Drawings, 1935–1962, The Morgan Library and Museum, New York (2016); The Photographic Tool, Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne, Switzerland (2018); Le Voyageur sans boussole, Centre Pompidou, Málaga, Spain (2018); L’arte in gioco. Matière e spirito 1943–1985, Fonazione Palazzo Magnani, Reggio Emilia, Italy (2018); Jean Dubuffet and Venice, Palazzo Franchetti-Cavalli, Venice (2019); Jean Dubuffet, Barbican Art Centre, London (2020–2021); Jean Dubuffet: Ardent Celebration, Museo Guggenheim, Bilbao, Spain (2022); and Jean Dubuffet. Rebonds: From One Work to Another, Fondation Dubuffet, Paris (2023–2024).

Jean Dubuffet’s work is held in over sixty public collections worldwide, including The Art Institute of Chicago; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Tate, London, among many others

PACE GALLERY NEW YORK

540 West 25th Street, New York City 

www.pacegallery.com

"Self-Portraits" Exhibition @ Skarstedt Paris

Self-Portraits

Skarstedt Paris

February 13 – March 29, 2025

Skarstedt Paris presents Self-Portraits, an exhibition that delves into the multifaceted nature of self-portraiture, exploring its significance as a means of self-expression throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Whether rendered in traditional or groundbreaking modes, each work on view delves into the paradoxes, nuances, and idiosyncrasies that make each identity unique, thereby connecting the artist’s individual ethos with universal values and themes.

Across the exhibition, the boundaries of self-representation dissolve into bold experimentation, where themes of transformation, temporality, and vulnerability intertwine. Jean Dubuffet’s Self-portrait from 1966, one of the six he ever made, would become the cover image of the Pompidou retrospective in 2001. It is part of the L’Hourloupe series, a cycle that sets a creative protocol between 1962 to 1974, a veritable exploration of a new language that touches on all artistic spheres explored by the French artist. Using sinuous, labyrinthine graphics, Jean Dubuffet composed schematic spaces like constructs of the mind. The surreal and the introspective converge in André Masson’s Le Voyant - Ville Crânienne (1940), a poetic synthesis of ink and gouache that evokes the fractured nature of identity as seen through a surrealist lens. The self emerges as both seer and subject, a fragment of the subconscious shaped by unseen forces. This notion of transformation continues in the conceptual play of Cindy Sherman, whose Untitled Film Still #24 (1978) disrupts the idea of self-portraiture as truth-telling. By embodying various personas through costumes and cinematic framing, Cindy Sherman dissolves herself into archetypes, exposing the performative masks society demands and the fluidity of personal identity. Martin Kippenberger's Untitled (1992), part of his series of Hand Painted Pictures, interrogates the conventions of self-portraiture by embracing irony and subversion, presenting the artist's identity as a fractured, performative construct. Through a deliberate amalgamation of self-deprecation and painterly virtuosity, Martin Kippenberger critiques the commodification of the artist's persona while questioning the authenticity of self-representation itself.

Georg Baselitz, by inverting his figure in Der Anfang ist der Abgang (The Beginning is the Departure) (2017), offers a meditation on the destabilization of the self. His deliberate subversion of form mirrors the psychological disorientation of self-reflection, confronting mortality and the inexorable passage of time. Similarly concerned with the interiority of human experience, Eric Fischl invites viewers into a deeply introspective yet playful meditation on the act of self-representation in Cat ‘n Hat (2024). By positioning himself in a jester’s hat, Eric Fischl underscores the inherent absurdity of the artist’s role—laying oneself bare before an audience through the act of painting. This duality, at once vulnerable and self-aware, reflects the paradox of creation as both an intimate exposure and a performative gesture, where humor becomes a defense against the weight of self-examination.

More than fifty years earlier, Pablo Picasso articulated his anxieties regarding his place within the art historical canon through works such as Buste d’Homme (1964), produced during a prolific period of introspective self-portraits that utilize a pared-down style to express the urgency of his feeling in his later years that he had “less and less time, and…more and more to say.”[1] Similarly, Francis Bacon’s late Study for Self-Portrait (1979) uses intense light and shadow to highlight the creases along his forehead and other visible signs of age, investigating himself as a means of simultaneously investigating the human condition, traumas, and violence. Turning to self-portraiture “because [he] had nobody else left to paint,”[2] this intimately-scaled work questions at what degree of distortion the work can still be a representation of the self. Juan Gris’s Autoportrait (1911-1912), rendered in the language of Cubism, deconstructs and reassembles the figure into facets of geometry. The fractured planes not only speak to the multiplicity of the self but also to the structural interplay between form and meaning in modernist art.

The tactile intensity of Frank Auerbach’s layered compositions further complicates notions of self. His visceral approach to works like Self-Portrait II (2024) transforms the portrait into a locus of memory, each mark carrying the weight of time’s erosion on identity. Similarly, Chantal Joffe’s vibrant palette and bold brushwork in a new painting imbue her portrayals with a raw immediacy and a diaristic quality that captures the precarious balance between strength and fragility, echoing themes of femininity, motherhood, and self-examination. Louis Fratino likewise fills his canvases with a quiet familiarity, using the queer body as a mirror for the vastness of memory and emotional expression. Throughout the 1980s, Robert Mapplethorpe also reflected his commitment to themes of gender expression. In Self-Portrait (1980), we find him draped in a luxurious fur coat, exuding an elegance in the style of Rrose Sélavy, Marcel Duchamp’s alter ego, whose playful fluidity of gender and self-reinvention are echoed by Mapplethorpe in a manner that suggests Robert Mapplethorpe’s rejection of traditional binary definitions of gender.

Through the subversive materiality of grease and pigment, David Hammons challenges the very medium of portraiture. His Untitled (circa 1970) resists conventional depictions of identity, offering instead an enigmatic interplay of texture and absence that critiques cultural and societal narratives, particularly as they relate to race in America. In making his body both the image and material of the work, David Hammons literally gives his viewers a reflection of his experience as a Black man in America. These themes continue in Untitled (SAMO) (1981) by Jean-Michel Basquiat. With its economy of means, Jean-Michel Basquiat conveys the reality of his place in American society and the visceral emotions that accompany it. His refusal to depict his true likeness in preference of a mask-like figure gets to the heart of self-portraiture’s role as a personal mode through which to explore identity, culture, and posit one’s own social commentaries. In making himself appear almost as an African mask, his experiences as a man of color in 1980s America act as proxy for the universal experiences of others like him.

Together, these artists reveal the self as a site of tension and transformation—a space where cultural, personal, and artistic identities collide and evolve. The works in Self-Portraits invite viewers to explore the shifting terrain of representation, where each artist unearths the essence of individuality within the universal human experience.

[1] Pablo Picasso quoted in Marie-Laure Bernadac, Late Picasso: Paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints 1953-1972 (London: Tate Publishing, 1988), 85.

[2] Francis Bacon, quoted in David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon (London: Thames & Hudson, 2016), 150.

SKARSTEDT PARIS

2 Avenue Matignon, 75008 Paris

www.skarstedt.com

Almanach de l'art brut par Jean Dubuffet et al.

Almanach de l'art brut
Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne
Institut suisse pour l’étude de l’art (SIK-ISEA)
Editions 5 Continents (Milan)

Almanach de l’Art Brut 

couverture de l’édition contemporaine, incluant le manuscrit original de 1948

Lausanne/Milan, Collection de l’Art Brut / SIK- ISEA/ 5 Continents Editions

A l’occasion des 40 ans de la Collection de l’Art Brut, le musée lausannois et l’Institut suisse pour l’étude de l’art (SIK-ISEA) s’associent pour publier l’Almanach de l’Art Brut, ouvrage conçu par Jean Dubuffet en 1948.

Couverture de la maquette de l’Almanach de l’Art Brut

réalisée par Jean Dubuffet en 1948, pour parution en 1949

Photo : Fabio Zuzzi / 5 Continents, Milan

Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne

Ce manuscrit historique paraît pour la première fois sous forme de fac-similé aux éditions 5 Continents (Milan). Le vernissage aura lieu dans lors du colloque intitulé « Actualité et enjeux critiques de l’Art Brut » organisé par la Collection de l’Art Brut et l’Université de Lausanne, les 3 et 4 novembre 2016.

Maquette de l’Almanach de l’Art Brut réalisée par Jean Dubuffet 

en 1948, pour parution en 1949

Photo : Caroline Smyrliadis (AN)

Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne

Le vent tourne

1ère page du tapuscrit du texte de Jean Dubuffet Le

vent tourne, prévu pour le cahier du mois de janvier de

l’Almanach de l’Art Brut

Photo : Caroline Smyrliadis (AN)

Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne

Placé sous la direction de Sarah Lombardi et de Baptiste Brun, l’édition contemporaine de l’Almanach de l’Art Brut est enrichie d’une préface, d’un essai critique, d’une postface et de notices biographiques des auteur-e-s et des rédacteur-trice-s du manuscrit original.

Parmi ceux-ci, citons des personnalités de premier plan de la scène littéraire et artistique parisienne, tels qu’André Breton, Benjamin Péret, Michel Tapié et Jean Paulhan, ou encore des ethnologues et psychiatres suisses, comme Eugène Pittard, Charles Ladame et Walter Morgenthaler. Les travaux de plus de quarante auteur-e-s y sont rassemblés, certain- e-s inconnu-e-s ou mésestimé-e-s à l’époque du projet initial. C’est ainsi que Jean Dubuffet réunit Aloïse Corbaz, Gaston Chaissac, Henri Salingardes, Scottie Wilson ou encore Adolf Wölfli autour de la notion d’Art Brut, qu’il mûrit alors.

Xavier Parguey 

Sans titre, entre 1943 et 1948, bois sculpté, 10,5 x 3 x 12,5 cm

photo : Henri Bonhotal, Paris/ numérisation : Claudine Garcia (AN)

Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne, [cahier Mai, article « Le Zouzou »]

Aloïse

Marie Stuart Sirène, s.d.

crayon de couleur sur papier, 57 x 44 cm

photo : Henri Bonhotal, Paris

numérisation : Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne

Musée des Arts Naïf et Populaires de Noyers, Noyers-sur-Sereins

Aloïse C.R. 833.01

[cahier Juillet, article « Aloyse »]

Adolf Wölfli

Saint Adolf mordu à la jambe par le serpent, 1921

mine de plomb et crayon de couleur sur papier, 68 x 51 cm

photographe non identifié

numérisation : Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne,

[cahier Avril, article « Wölfli »]

L’ouvrage est assorti d’un cahier iconographique de plus de 80 photographies en noir et blanc reproduisant les oeuvres destinées à l’illustration des textes originaux, ainsi que d’une bibliographie et d’un index.

Collection de l'Art Brut
Avenue des Bergières 11, 1004 Lausanne
www.artbrut.ch

BRAFA Art Fair 2016, Bruxelles

BRAFA Art Fair 2016, Bruxelles

23 - 31 janvier 2016

La Brafa 2016 accueillera un nombre record de 137 galeries, soit près de 10% de plus qu’en 2015 (126). Celles-ci se répartissent en 17 pays : Belgique (55) ; France (48) ; Suisse (8) ; Allemagne (7) ; Grande-Bretagne (5) ; Pays-Bas et Italie (3) ; Monaco (2) ; Autriche, Canada, Danemark, Espagne, Hongrie, Japon, Luxembourg, Russie et USA (1). Cette augmentation du nombre d’exposants répond à une demande de plus en plus forte de nouvelles participations, à laquelle il n’avait pas été possible d’accéder par manque d’espace disponible. En choisissant de déplacer la brasserie sous une structure contiguë externe, créant ainsi un début de nouvelle allée, il a été possible de gagner quelque 660 m² et de pouvoir installer une dizaine de nouveaux stands. En conséquence, l’entrée sera légèrement remaniée en redessinant l’espace d’accueil et en orientant différemment les visiteurs de façon à les faire pénétrer en milieu de bâtiment plutôt qu’en début de celui-ci.

HELENE BAILLY GALLERY

25 Quai Voltaire - FR-75007 Paris - France

71 Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré - FR-75008 Paris - France

www.helenebailly.com

FERNAND LEGER

Les bûches, 1952

Fernand Léger (Argentan 1881-1955 Gif-sur-Yvette)

Gouache, aquarelle, pinceau et encre de chine sur papier

51 x 65,5 cm

Monogrammé et daté en bas à droite : FL52 et dédicacé: 'aux 2 Bernier avec mes amitiés FLeger'

Littérature: catalogue de l'exposition 'Léger', Janvier-Mars 1999, Musée d’Art de Nassau County 

Exhibition: Musée d’Art, Nassau County, 'Léger', Janvier-Mars 1999

BOON GALLERY

Kustlaan 197 - BE-8300 Knokke-Zoute - Belgique

www.boongallery.com

FERNAND LEGER

Coupe à fruit, 1948

Fernand Léger (Argentan 1881-1955 Gif-sur-Yvette)

Ecole française

Gouache sur papier

37,5 x 53 cm

Parmi les 20 nouvelles enseignes qui participeront à cette édition 2016, l’on compte huit retours (Alexis Bordes, Paris : Dessins et tableaux du XVIIe jusqu'au début XXe siècle / Eric Coatalem, Paris : Tableaux, dessins et sculptures de maîtres français et italiens du XVIIe au XXe siècle / De Jonckheere, Genève, Paris et Londres: Tableaux anciens / K. Grusenmeyer, Bruxelles : Art asiatique et tribal – Antiquité et Haute Epoque / Francis Janssens van der Maelen, Bruxelles : Argenterie des XVIIIe et XIXe siècles, Art Nouveau et Art Deco / Pascal Lansberg, Paris : Art moderne et contemporain / Perrin Antiquaires, Paris : Mobilier, objets d’art et tableaux des XVIIe, XVIIIe et XIXe siècles / Michel Rooryck, Courtrai : tableaux, dessins, sculptures XIXe – XXe s.), et douze nouveaux participants (Albert Baronian, Bruxelles : art contemporain / Galerie Boulakia, Paris – Londres : tableaux impressionnistes, modernes et contemporains / Jean-Christophe Charbonnier, Paris : armes, armures et objets d’art du Japon / Deletaille, Bruxelles : arts premiers et précolombiens / Dierking Gallery, Zurich : Dessins, Art moderne et contemporain, Art précolombien et tribal art tribal / Frank Landau, Francfort : objets d’art et design XXe s. / Galerie Le Beau, Bruxelles : arts décoratifs et design XXe s. / Meessen De Clercq, Bruxelles : art contemporain / La Patinoire Royale, Bruxelles : arts plastiques et design seconde moitié du XXe s. / Günter Puhze, Freiburg : archéologie / Safani Gallery Inc., New York : archéologie / Thomas Salis Art & Design, Salzbourg Art et design: art européen XXe s.).

« Nous sommes très heureux de pouvoir présenter à Bruxelles une telle liste de participants, déclare Harold t’Kint de Roodenbeke, Président de la manifestation. Elle constitue une combinaison idéale d’exposants traditionnels dont il faut souligner la fidélité et qui ont fait la force de notre événement, tout en s’ouvrant à de nouveaux noms prestigieux que nous sommes particulièrement fiers d’accueillir. Nous attendons cette édition avec grande impatience ! ».

JABLONKA MARUANI MERCIER GALLERY

Rue de la Régence 17 - BE-1000 Brussels - Belgique

Kustlaan 90 - BE-8300 Knokke - Belgique

www.jmmgallery.com 

ANDY WARHOL

Robert Mapplethorpe

Andy Warhol (Pittsburgh 1928-1987 New York)

Sériegraphie sur carton lenox qualité musée

102 x 102 cm

Porte les initiales VF (Vincent Fremont), la marque de la Fondation Andy Warhol pour les Arts visuels, le numéro UP41.77 et à l’arrière le cachet de la succession Andy Warhol.

Elle a été réalisée en 1983 et est unique.

ALBERT BARONIAN

Rue Isidore Verheyden 2 - BE-1050 Brussels - Belgique

Rue de la Concorde 33 - BE-1050 Brussels - Belgique

www.albertbaronian.com

GILBERT & GEORGE

CRIME, 2011

Gilbert (San Martino, 1943) and George (Devon, 1942)

Techniques mixtes 

226 x 254 cm

Quelques tendances générales semblent se dessiner pour cette édition 2016 de la Brafa

La section archéologie, déjà riche de spécialistes reconnus parmi lesquels J. Bagot, Chenel, Cybèle, Roswitha Eberwein, David Ghezelbash, Gilgamesh, Harmakhis, Mermoz ou Phoenix Ancient Art, est sans conteste renforcée par la venue de la galerie allemande Günter Puhze et de la galerie américaine Safani Gallery Inc. (New York). Cette dernière est l’une des plus anciennes galeries d’art des Etats-Unis (fondée en 1946) qui compte parmi sa clientèle des musées tels le Metropolitan Museum et le Louvre et aussi d’importantes collections privées. Elle présentera à la Brafa quelques-unes de ses plus belles pièces d’origine romaine ou proche-orientale. Pour sa première participation, le belge Deletaille dévoilera un Seigneur Maya, impressionnante terre cuite d’Alta Verapaz, Hautes terres du Guatemala, de 300-500 après J.-C.

L’offre en tableaux anciens sera renforcée par la galerie De Jonckheere, d’origine belge et désormais établie à Genève, Paris et Londres. Aux côtés des maîtres de la peinture flamande qu’ils présentent depuis tant d’années, ils accrocheront également à leurs cimaises des œuvres d’artistes plus récents tels René Magritte. Si elle avait marqué les esprits en 2015 avec son stand entièrement dédié à des artistes russes, la Galerie Kunstberatung Zürich promet cette année un stand entièrement consacré aux maîtres anciens. A découvrir assurément, sans oublier les sélections toujours très pointues de Eric Coatalem, Costermans, Jocelyne Crouzet, Douwes Fine Art, Jan Muller Antiques, Klaas Muller, Florence De Voldère ou encore Floris van Wanroij.

Autre traditionnel point fort de la Brafa, la section arts premiers regroupant des marchands tels Didier Claes, Pierre Dartevelle, Bernard Dulon, Yann Ferrandin, Jacques Germain, Galerie Monbrison, Serge Schoffel et Schoffel de Fabry, promet cette année encore de fascinantes surprises. Ainsi Serge Schoffel a réuni un ensemble d’objets exceptionnels explorant sept thèmes précis parmi les arts séculaires d’Afrique, d’Océanie et d’Amérique. Il exposera notamment, un rarissime masque Grébo (Libéria) du XIXe s., représentant un éléphant ou encore une sculpture Maori d’un manaia originaire de Nouvelle-Zélande (XVIIIe s.).

La Brafa a en partie bâti sa réputation sur son goût très prononcé de l’éclectisme, du décloisonnement des spécialités, du mariage des styles et des époques. Axel Vervoordt, fidèle exposant de la Brafa, fait figure de pionnier en ce domaine où il s’est imposé internationalement. Il ne dérogera pas à son style en créant un dialogue entre des pièces archéologiques de diverses origines et des créations d’artistes contemporains tels Günther Uecker ou Lucio Fontana. Présents pour la première fois à la Brafa, le trio formé par les galeries Dierking (Zurich) / Frank Landau (Francfort) / Thomas Salis (Salzbourg) dévoilera un stand conceptuel très attendu où du mobilier et des créations XXe s. et contemporaines s’intégreront à des œuvres africaines et asiatiques. Probablement un must de cette édition 2016 !

Bien que les arts anciens soient encore très largement représentés à la Brafa (en témoigne la large section dévolue aux arts médiévaux et Haute Epoque, avec des exposants tels De Backker Medieval Art, De Pauw-Müller, Desmet Gallery, Mullany, Rainer Jungbauer), il est manifeste que l’art moderne et l’art contemporain y occupent chaque année une place de plus en plus large, bien que volontairement conservée dans des proportions équilibrées par les organisateurs. Dans cette dernière spécialité, la venue des galeries Albert Baronian, Meessen De Clercq et la Patinoire Royale attestent de l’influence grandissante de l’art contemporain à Bruxelles, devenu un lieu incontournable sur ce marché.

OPERA GALLERY

10-12 Place Longemalle - CH-1204 Geneva - Suisse

www.operagallery.com

JEAN DUBUFFET

Mage, 1971

Jean Dubuffet (Le Havre 1901-1985 Paris)

Acrylique sur klegecell

181 x 96 cm

Signé et daté en bas à droite J.D 71

Provenance: Galerie Beyeler, Bâle; collection privée, Suisse

Littérature: ‘Catalogue des travaux de Jean Dubuffet’, vol. XXVII 'Coucou Bazar' n° 52, part 44 ; catalogue exposition ‘Dubuffet’, The Waddington Galleries I, II, II, Londres, 7 Juin-8 juillet 1972, n° 62; catalogue exposition ‘Jean Dubuffet’, Galleria Levi, Milan, Octobre-Novembre 1972, n° 33 

Expositions: ‘Dubuffet’, The Waddington Galleries I, II, II, Londres, 7 Juin-8 Juillet 1972; ‘Jean Dubuffet’, Galleria Levi, Milan, Octobre-Novembre 1972; ‘Jean Dubuffet. L´Hourloupe’, Artel Gallery, Genève, 3 Mai-28 Juillet 1973

La Brafa est heureuse d’accueillir les Floralies de Gand en tant qu’Invité d’Honneur 2016, un événement belge de renommée internationale dont la première édition s’est tenue en 1809, bien avant même la création de la Belgique ! Sa prochaine édition aura lieu du 22 avril au 1 mai 2016 sur quatre sites et selon quatre thèmes dans le Quartier des Arts, en plein cœur de Gand. Sa scénographie à la Brafa a été confiée au talent du fleuriste anversois Mark Colle, qui s’est notamment rendu célèbre pour ses mises en scène audacieuses lors des défilés de Dries Van Noten, Jil Sander ou Dior. « La création florale hivernale de Mark Colle offrira un superbe avant-goût des Floralies 2016, où fleurs et plantes entreront en dialogue avec de sublimes lieux de la ville de Gand. Cette toute nouvelle édition des Floralies consacrera pour la toute première fois depuis sa création, une attention particulière à l'intégration et à l'interprétation des plantes et des fleurs dans des installations d'art moderne. Les Floralies sont très fières d'être présentes en tant qu'invité d'honneur à la Brafa, deux événements éclectiques qui partagent une même exigence de la plus haute qualité et d'authenticité ! », déclare Dirk De Cock, CEO de l’événement.

La décoration générale de la foire signe à nouveau le retour du talentueux bureau Volume Architecture qui collaborera cette année étroitement avec l’Invité d’Honneur pour créer une atmosphère inspiré de l’art floral et du Land Art.

Cette édition 2016 marque également les 10 ans de collaboration entre la Brafa et Delen Private Bank, une coopération fructueuse qui a vu les deux partenaires grandir et évoluer côte à côte.

Toute aussi fructueux mais plus récent, le concours lancé au sein des étudiants de l’école nationale supérieure des arts visuels La Cambre a permis pour la 3ème fois de créer un motif unique et original pour le tapis des allées. A découvrir sur place…

Enfin, le cycle de conférences quotidiennes ‘Brafa Art Talks‘ rassemblera à nouveau un large panel de personnalités du monde de l’art, directeurs de musées, conservateurs, collectionneurs ou experts. Il permettra aux visiteurs d’en apprendre davantage, entre autres, sur les collections et pièces-phares des prestigieux musées d’ethnographie de Genève et des antiquités égyptologiques de Turin, sur la plus précieuse des monnaies anciennes (conservée à Bruxelles …), sur la technique de datation au carbone 14, sans oublier une table ronde bien d’à-propos sur l’investissement dans l’art !

BRAFA – Brussels Art Fair

Tour & Taxis, Avenue du Port 86 C – 1000 Bruxelles

www.brafa.be

Jean Dubuffet, Pace Gallery, New York - Excursions en no man's space Exhibition

Jean Dubuffet 

Excursions en no man's space

Pace Gallery, New York

September 10 – October 26, 2013

Pace presents Excursions en no man’s space, a solo exhibition of Jean Dubuffet’s drawings made between 1975 and 1985. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue including an essay by Jean Dubuffet’s art dealer and long-time friend, Arne Glimcher. The gallery has presented work by Jean Dubuffet since 1968.

Excursions en no man’s space features 52 works, mostly black and white but concluding with the primaries: red, yellow and blue. They range in content from figurative to abstract and elemental forms. Made during the last ten years of his life and career, these drawings are “landscapes of the mind,” a space between being and fantasy. In Jean Dubuffet’s own words, these works are “excursions in no man’s space.”

In 1974, after 12 years spent on his Hourloupe cycle (the artist’s longest-running series), Dubuffet began new experiments, expanding his color palette and brushwork and revisiting techniques such as collage from earlier periods in his career. These late drawings are intimate in scale (ranging in size from 20 by 27 1/2 inches to 9 13/16 by 8 11/16 inches) compared to Dubuffet’s other late projects such as his expansive Théâtres de Mémoire [Theaters of Memory], yet embody the same structural approach.

Jean Dubuffet’s black and white drawings, in particular his Conjectures [April 16, 1975 – May 29, 1975], Memorations [September 2, 1978 – January 5, 1979] and Situations [April 23, 1978 – April 24, 1980] series contain cut-out figurative imagery collaged into their surrounding landscape. In some works, the ground appears as a patchwork of patterns, while other works show figures of people, cars and trees enmeshed in a network of furiously scrawled lines. In his essay Arne Glimcher writes, “One of the signatures of Jean Dubuffet’s practice is the annihilation of hierarchical values, reflected in his construction of an art that rebels against consensus societal valuations.”

The color drawings, Argument and Activation, made between 1983 and 1985, mirror the two final series of paintings for Jean Dubuffet, Mires [Kowloon] and Non-Lieux. In both series, the artist returns to a color palette and eliminates the reference imagery of cutout characters. Glimcher writes, “They are landscapes of the mind in which there is no harmony, no reason, no hierarchical values, and at least for Dubuffet the end of picture making...”

JEAN DUBUFFET (1901–1985) was one of the most influential painters of the twentieth century. A student of the Académie Julian in Paris, he left school in 1918 to pursue an independent form of art education. Like many of his generation in Europe in the wake of World War II, Dubuffet sought artistic authenticity outside of tradition, in the margins of society. He looked to the art of prisoners, psychics, the uneducated, and the insane to liberate his own creativity and coined the term “Art Brut,” a predecessor to outsider art of the late 1940s. In his lifetime, Jean Dubuffet was the subject of 12 major museum retrospectives including The Museum of Modern Art (1962), which traveled to The Art Institute of Chicago and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Tate Gallery, London (1966); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1966); Museum of Fine Arts, Dallas (1966), which traveled to the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Musée des Beaux-Arts, Montreal (1969-70); and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1973, 1981). In 1973, Dubuffet established a foundation to preserve and realize his monumental works. The foundation is located in Paris and in Périgny-sur-Yerres, where the Closerie Falbala, a monumental sculpture and the artist’s major work (designated a historic monument in 1998), is situated near the former sculpture studios that house the artist’s architectural models. The Villa Falbala, which Dubuffet built to shelter his Cabinet Logologique, stands at the center of this enormous walled simulacrum of a garden. Paintings and elements from the artist’s production of Coucou Bazar, performed in 1973 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, are also on view in Périgny-sur-Yerres. Today, Jean Dubuffet’s work can be found in more than 60 public collections worldwide including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and the Tate Gallery, London. Pace Gallery has represented Jean Dubuffet since 1968.

PACE GALLERY

32 East 57th Street, New York, NY 10022

www.pacegallery.com

Dado – Dubuffet. Le temps d’une rencontre, Exposition au Musée de Sérignan

Dado – Dubuffet

Le temps d’une rencontre

Musée de Sérignan

20 janvier - 15 avril 2007

Le 23 septembre 2006, la commune de Sérignan, située à 9 kilomètres au sud de Béziers, inaugurait le musée de Sérignan, premier musée d’art contemporain de l’Hérault. Ce musée présente sur près de 2500 m2 une collection permanente constituée principalement de dons d’artistes et des expositions temporaires.

Après A means to an end / un moyen une finalité - Lawrence Weiner (23 septembre 2006 - 7 janvier 2007), la seconde exposition temporaire du musée de Sérignan met en parallèle le travail des artistes Miodrag Djuric dit Dado et de Jean Dubuffet. 

Après la Seconde Guerre mondiale, quelques artistes, adeptes d’une peinture improvisée, ressentent la nécessité de profondes remises en question. Leur art, dit "informel", ne doit rien au passé et ne subit aucune influence. Jean Dubuffet fait partie de ces peintres dont l’objectif est de s’arracher de l’emprise de la tradition et d’explorer des territoires inconnus, afin de retrouver la "spontanéité ancestrale de la main humaine quand elle trace des signes". Arrivé en France en 1956, à l’age de 23 ans Dado travaille dans un atelier de lithographie où il rencontre Jean Dubuffet. Ce dernier lui fait rencontrer Daniel Cordier qui deviendra son marchand. De la fin des années cinquante à la fin des années soixante, les deux artistes vont s’influencer mutuellement aussi bien dans leur production picturale que dans leurs éditions. L’exposition s’attache à présenter un ensemble complet de leur rencontre et influences réciproques.

« En 1959, rue de Miromesnil, Daniel Cordier présente « Célébration du sol » : des topographies et « des texturologies » à la gloire de l’humble terre piétinée par les hommes (...). A la gouache, à l’huile, avec des collages, il imite la glaise et le goudron avec une remarquable exactitude » (Philippe Dagen). Au contact de ces œuvres, paysages et personnages de Dado apparaissent taillés dans une même matière inqualifiable. Dado ne cherche pas à reproduire le motif naturel et se soucie bien peu de l’exactitude ; il n’imite pas, il ne procède pas à un relevé, il imagine un monde irréaliste ou le nuage et la roche peuvent être de même substance. Les histoires monténégrines et la sensibilité d’enfant dont fait preuve Dado qui n’hésite pas à grossir monstrueusement certains détails, mélanger la réalité visible et la réalité racontée, faire côtoyer sans les distinguer l’horreur et le merveilleux semble directement marquer le travail de Jean Dubuffet. Le trait des œuvres de ce dernier, surtout ses gravures, acquiert un dessin volontairement malhabile, proche de la caricature ou du graffiti. Sa passion pour les dessins d’enfant, de malades mentaux ou encore de prisonniers confirme le trait du jeune artiste yougoslave. Dans les matériologies, Dubuffet n’inscrit ni de figures, à l’exception de rares dessins de personnages dans les paysages, ni d’éléments tragiques contrairement à Dado. Dubuffet s’attache à un sujet précisément circonscrit, il l’impose fortement par une représentation simplifiée et absolument explicite. Ce dernier n’hésitant pas à déclarer qu’il est « passionné d'être l'homme du commun du plus bas étage » car ses véritables maîtres sont les enfants, les gens du commun, les malades mentaux. Aucune équivoque également par les titres qui évitent au spectateur toute hésitation dans les œuvres de Dubuffet, « à l’inverse Dado, se satisfait le plus souvent d’un laconique « sans titre » qui laisse toute liberté, y compris celle de se perdre »  (Philippe Dagen).

La passion de Sérignan pour Dado est ancienne. En effet, en 1994 Dado investit le domaine des Orpellières, domaine vinicole désaffecté situé à Sérignan Plage. L’artiste y séjourne régulièrement jusqu’en 1999 – date de l’inauguration – et y réalise des peintures murales et des sculptures objets. L’ancien Espace d’art contemporain Gustave Fayet a consacré deux expositions temporaires au travail de l’artiste. Afin d’apporter un nouveau regard sur le travail du peintre monténégrin et de l’inventeur de l’art brut, le Musée de Sérignan a décidé de regrouper leur travail.

En parallèle, les vitrines expérimentales seront investies par les éditions Fata Morgana. A l’occasion des 40 ans de la maison d’édition languedocienne, le musée présente le travail de collaboration avec les artistes notamment avec des livres illustrés par Pierre Alechinsky, Bernard Dufour, Jean Messagier, Dado, Capdeville, Michel Tapiès, Geer Van Velde, Rougemont, Saura…

Exposition réalisée en collaboration avec la galerie Alain Margaron, la galerie Baudoin Lebon, Pierre et Marianne Nahon et les Editions Fata Morgana.

Musée de Sérignan

146 avenue de la Plage, 34410 Sérignan

www.ville-serignan.fr

Ollivier Pourriol, Le Peintre au couteau, roman

Ollivier Pourriol, Le Peintre au couteau

© Le Livre de Poche / avec son autorisation

Le Livre de Poche, Collection « Littérature & Documents »
Date de parution : Avril 2006
324 pages - 5,50 €

Le roman d'Ollivier Pourriol, paru initialement chez Grasset, a été réédité par Le Livre de Poche.

« Qui sait que ces couleurs sont celles du visage de ma femme disparue et aimée tendrement et regrettée éternellement ? Là où l'oeil exercé voit un vert Véronèse, moi je sais qu'il s'agit du bleu des yeux de ma femme, mais d'un bleu en mouvement, ce n'est pas encore un vert, mais ce n'est plus vraiment un bleu, c'est un bleu en fuite, c'est le bleu des yeux de ma femme qui me trahit. Quel marchand de couleurs osera vendre un jour un tube de « Bleu des yeux de ma femme qui me trahit » ? »

Un peintre de quatre-vingt-cinq ans, cloué par une appendicite, ouvre à son chirurgien un monde sur le point de disparaître, où l'on croise Dubuffet, Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Nicolas de Staël, René Char, Braque, Music, Gischia. Le temps de quelques conversations, l'homme du pinceau et du couteau transmet à l'homme de l'art et du scalpel ce qu'il a de plus précieux : son oeil. Que peut-on contre la mort ? Pas grand-chose, répond le chirurgien. Apprécier les couleurs de la vieillesse, répond le peintre. Et, si possible, finir en beauté.

EAN / ISBN : 9782253115199

A lire également sur Wanafoto un message consacré à l’essai d’Ollivier Pourriol, Alain, le grand voleur qui introduit notamment à une approche de l’art par le philosophe Alain.

From Picasso to Basquiat at Institut Valencià d’Art Moderne IVAM

Exhibition:
Fire under the Ashes. From Picasso to Basquiat
Institut Valencià d’Art Modern IVAM
5 May - 28 August 2005

Curator: Kosme de Barañano

The exhibition is based on the review of primitive art, or children’s art, carried out by numerous artists since Surrealism, which shaped the iconography of avant-garde art, both in Europe and in America, with respect to the human figure, the face and graffiti, in Constructivism, Art Brut, Informalism and the legacy of Abstract Expressionism. The selection of works in the exhibition traces the evolution and development of that imagery – that fire – in modern art through the work of such acclaimed artists as Jean Dubuffet, Michel Haas, Germaine Richier, Gaston Chaissac, Pablo Picasso, Joaquín Torres-García and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

The title of the exhibition comes from some words quoted by Jan Krugier when recalling a visit to Rothko: “Rothko struck me as having something shamanistic about him – there was a truth in him that he had to express. I remember going to see him once late at night in his studio in New York. And while I was looking at his paintings, he came out with a phrase that really struck me: ‘If you are looking for fire, you will find it beneath the ashes.’ Fashionable painters aren’t looking for fire. They simply make pictures, and that’s it. Rothko found this phrase in a book he had in the studio by Martin Buber. It’s a very beautiful expression and I think it sums up the role that shamans play. They find fire beneath the ashes. They rediscover our truth and transmit it to us. It is a message that has to be delivered, that is absolutely vital – because, without that fire, we are nothing.”

The exhibition seeks to present a recurrent option in twentieth-century painting and sculpture, the application of the supposedly naive mark, free of cultural roots. In these works, or rather in the poetics of these artists, the mechanisms of memory go back to prehistoric graffiti, to the icon. Despite the very different poetics of these artists, they have a common denominator: the primitive appearance of the mark, a schematic mark or blot. Among the artists whose work makes up this show – Pablo Picasso, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Joaquín Torres-García, Jean Dubuffet, Gaston Chaissac, Michel Haas, Germaine Richier and Louis Soutter, the last two of whom have never been exhibited before in Spain – there are common features, but the vocabulary is different; each one has a different rhythmic tension or linear precision, a different concision and constructive power. There are differences of texture, colour, phrasing and expression in all of them.

In all of them there is an economy in the mixture of colours and an economy in the marks used. They simplify the subject or lay it bare so as to give it the value of an icon. Sometimes their works look like drawing because of their simplification, their economy of style. The proposal or experiment is to master the figure with a simple construction, not expressive or connotative but formalized. One can see the recollection of certain signs or aspects of how to synthesize reality in a new image which have reappeared again and again since the palaeolithic caves. Ranging from Picasso to Basquiat, the exhibition assembles these signs or graffiti which come from prehistory and from the imagination of children. This influence on twentieth-century art of drawings done by children or the insane appeared in the work of Paul Klee or Louis Soutter, but also in the first almanac produced by the group Der Blaue Reiter in 1912 there were children’s drawings, together with works of African and medieval art.

Jean Dubuffet (Le Havre, 1901 – Paris, 1985) belongs to a group of painters whose aim was to move away from the influence of tradition and explore unknown techniques in order to recapture the “ancestral spontaneity of the human hand when making marks”. His paintings of pure form, sometimes figurative, sometimes abstract, with bold colours and deliberate clumsiness, recall the expressions of the mentally ill and children, although this does not mean that their style is less elaborate. Dubuffet plays with clumsiness, doodles and raw matter in order to go back to the origins of art. In 1948, together with the writer André Breton and Antoni Tàpies, he created the Compagnie de l’Art Brut, which was a focus for the work of marginal individuals, an undertaking that sought to open up the art world for children and people marginalized by society. Often causing outrage with his deliberately childlike style, he sought to seduce, to celebrate deformity and materials that repel at first sight. An inventor and provoker of talent, Dubuffet succeeded in teaching how to look at the world from a new perspective.

The work of Michel Haas (1934) comes from most of the contemporary trends concerned with new figuration, such as the London School, Abstract Expressionism in America and free figuration in France. His paintings seem to belong to a time that is not ours, indicating traces of the art of cave painting or the corroded fragment of a fresco which bears the bruises of history. His technique is based on the use of simple materials such as water, charcoal and glue. His work has evolved from an initial fluidity and transparency to a form of relief which solidifies and inscribes his forms more profoundly in the thickness of the paper.

The early works of Germaine Richier (Grans, 1902 – Montpellier, 1959) are classical in appearance. During the war she devoted herself to making clay models of rather unattractive animals such as bats or toads, which she deformed so that they looked like unfinished creatures, somewhere between the birth of life and catastrophe. At the end of her career she made painted plasters and bronzes. Her work La sauterelle (The Locust), with a woman’s head, does not correspond to a facile Surrealism but places the act of art above the conventional world. After the war, her violent, refined, cruel contemporary sculpture revealed new expressive possibilities for figuration to Giacometti and many later sculptors.

In the early years of his activity Gaston Chaissac (Avallon, 1910 – La Roche-sur-Yon, 1964) felt the fascination of a vocabulary that emerged from prehistoric forms. In the forties his work was characterized by thick profiles in black ink, the use of light colours and isolated strokes of watercolour, presenting scenes that conjured up the imagination of the child. Chaissac was a member of the Compagnie de l’Art Brut created by Dubuffet in 1948 as an attempt to seek a new line of innovation which would escape from academic art and “fine art”. The concept of Art Brut was defined then as a new stage of art, distanced from traditional art and cultural influences.

The inclination for caricature and the grotesque of Pablo Picasso (Málaga, 1881 – Notre-Dame-de-Vie, 1973) and the sense of irony of which he himself was often a recurrent focus are revealed in the caricatures of the works of his youth, in which he animalized faces and portrayed salacious and scatological situations. The works presented in this exhibition show the importance of caricature in Picasso’s art and how that unprecedented cross between caricature, children’s drawings, primitivism and fragmentation of classical forms led to what has been called the “Picasso style”.

Joaquín Torres-García (Montevideo, 1874–1949) received a classical training. During the time that he spent in Paris (from 1926 to 1932) he joined leading European avant-garde movements which enabled him to develop the basis for an art that he caused to evolve in a very individual way. In 1930 he and Michel Seuphor founded the Cercle et Carré group. Although Torres-García quickly moved away from the members of the group, the pure abstraction principles of Neo-Plasticism enabled him to develop his personal style: a language based on a system of geometrical relationships and a repertoire of pictograms. His Universal Constructivism, dating from his time in Paris, was based on the assembly, on a metal grid, of universal symbols taken from ancient and modern cultures, including Pre-Hispanic cultures, in which he showed special interest.

Jean-Michel Basquiat (New York, 1960–1988) was associated with the punk movement and channelled his need for self-expression into designing jewellery and painting clothes which he then devoted himself to selling. In this way he gradually completed his training on a completely self-taught basis, inspired by Picasso, African art, jazz and children’s drawings. His pictures are full of enigmas and discrete symbols which can only be deciphered by those who knew him well. An examination of his work reveals the frequency with which he provides the possibility of escape by painting icons that refer to the primitive tradition inherited from his family, and it shows his predilection  or striking, almost garish colours, as extreme as his existence. Also read on this blog the post about  Basquiat’s works exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, 2005 -

The exhibition includes both paintings and sculptures by these artists, emphasizing the primitivism that underlies them all, making this show a visceral visual experience.

To accompany the show, the IVAM has published a catalogue, illustrated with colour reproductions of the items exhibited, together with texts by the curator of the exhibition, Kosme de Barañano, and the poets Jaime Siles and Guillermo Carnero.