collection Sylvie and Stéphane Corréard

Eugene von Bruenchenhein, a humble baker from Milwaukee, believed that being born in the year of the passage of Halley’s Comet was irrefutable proof that the gods had endowed him with artistic genius. In 1943, he married Eveline Kalke, who was 10 years younger than him, and she became his muse, inspirer, and subject, directly or indirectly, of all his art. He renamed her Marie. Photography then became his primary mode of expression: he created hundreds of portraits of Marie adorned with different attributes. Marie becomes, by turns, a goddess, queen, star, seductress, or ingenue. In 2013, these photographs were featured at the Venice Biennale, while an entire room was dedicated to him in the exhibition An Alternative Guide to The Universe at the Hayward Gallery in London.⁠

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.

Behind James Edwards Deeds’ art hides the story of a young American, born in 1908 in Springfield, Missouri, and forcibly committed to a psychiatric hospital at the age of 17. He would spend his whole life there, enduring electroshock treatments up to twice a week, without anaesthetic.