art)&(marges collection

Josef Hofer, who has been a resident of an Austrian institution for more than 30 years, does not speak. He draws. Tirelessly. In the metaphoric mirror that he uses and reaches out to us, people attempt to flee from the straitjacket of the frame with eroticized and untamed grace. His works - to which Michel Thévoz has devoted several essays - depict a founding duality between body and psyche. Present in numerous museum collections, he is also part of great private collections: A. de Galbert (France), A. Shaker (Switzerland) and even in the collection of A. Rainer (Austria), who considers him “one of the greatest of the brut contemporary artists.” A significant number of his works was donated to the Centre Pompidou collection in 2021 while the gallery became the owner of his estate in 2022.

At a very young age, Marilena Pelosi began to make drawings in which exuberant Catholicism and feverish Macumba, from her native Brazil, swirled to the point of delirium. The reminiscence of trance, eucharistic processions and carnivals are inextricably combined with much more intimate evocations. Established in France for several decades, she continues these same troubling drawings, made with ballpoint pens, in which doll-women are both executioners and victims. Now part of the CNAP collection, in 2019 she will join BIC (France), and in 2021 the Musée d’art moderne (Pompidou, France) and was recently included in the collections of LaM - Lille Métropole Musée d’Art Moderne, Art Contemporain, and Art Brut in 2025 (France).

In his eighteens, while he got ready to start studying fine arts, a coma after a serious motorcycle accident changed the promising life of this young artist. The impossibility of recovery condemned Dominique Théte to fantasize about his life. This is why almost all his drawings are followed by a “Shema (sic) representing me…” where he stages different aspects of his fantasy life, whereas in the afternoon suit he would wear during his marriage, in a comedian loved by his audience, in a star singer, or in the reproduction of the numerous cars he dreams of. As Anne-Françoise Rouche implied: “Because he was stolen from his construction of common person, he is going to draw and to write that of[…]

Jill Gallieni is as discreet and mysterious as are the prayers she lays on paper. Indeed, these prayers can only be addressed to the saints they invoke, for they are intentionally rendered unreadable. Cryptic writing par excellence, where absence is made visible, her work plunges us into a deep anchorite universe. For more than 10 years, the gallery has represented this French artist, whose works are as well part of major European collections of art brut such as that of the Museum of Modern Art (Pompidou), the Museum of LaM (France), of art brut in Lausanne (Switzerland) or even of the Hannah Rieger collection (Austria).