les unes et les autres

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).

He is the most widely exhibited and published living art brut artist, yet the extraordinary trajectory of this Frenchman raises a question that is rarely addressed: that of the impermanence of art brut. Discovered by Jean Dubuffet at a time when he was working on the resurgence of the symbolic body, he allowed himself to become the protean artist we know and who, in his creation, embodies absolute freedom. His work can be found in countless collections, and he was the first artist brut to enter the collections of the Musée national d’art moderne (Pompidou). Exhibited at the Monnaie de Paris, the Albertina Museum and the Mona, Michel Nedjar has been the subject of nine monographic exhibitions.

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).

A nurse by trade, it was during meetings at the Marseille Communist Party that she began drawing in the 1960s. Found drowned in the Seine in 1980, she left behind an exceptional body of work. Often compared to Henri Michaux, her ideographic drawings in Indian ink are full of mystery. In 1967 she was part of the historical exhibition L’Art Brut at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. Now present in numerous collections, including the Collection de l’Art Brut (Lausanne), the LaM (Villeneuve d’Ascq) but also in the abcd/Bruno Decharme collection (France), a dossier is devoted to her in the Fascicule de l’Art Brut n°11.