31553580 (obsessie/obsession) :

Luboš Plný’s international recognition was firmly established in 2017, when he was selected for the 57th Venice Biennale. The first Art Brut artist to be acquired by the Musée National d’Art Moderne (MNAM) in 2013, he has since been the subject of exhibitions at the contemporary art museums of Kobe and Hiroshima, the Kunsthalle Dresden, and in his native Prague, where the Rudolfinum, notably, brought his work into dialogue with artists such as Louise Bourgeois and William Kentridge in 2022. In September 2023, we dedicated a solo exhibition to him across both our spaces, published a monograph, and presented a performance at the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris.

A former US Air Force technician, he was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome in his thirties. In his case, it manifests as an eidetic memory that allows him to bring a wealth of numerical data relating to his favourite subjects to the surface of his works. Time, magic squares, the Titanic and imaginary megacities are among the recurring themes of his drawings. His work is held in collections including those of the Smithsonian (Washington) and the Centre Pompidou (France), and has been exhibited at the Palais de Tokyo in the cult exhibition Le Bord des mondes, in An Alternative Guide to the Universe at the Hayward Gallery in London, and at Lafayette Anticipations in Paris.
He is also profiled in the documentary La Folie art brut, broadcast on Arte.

A typographer by training, Košek first became a fairly conventional artist. When he fell into psychosis, he began to produce works as radical as poetic. Convinced that he plays a decisive role in the sequencing of the world, he spends his time at his window, recording his observations - meteorology, bird flights, insignificant facts - and aggregating them into diagrams supposed to ward off chaos. For fifteen years and across the world, from the Palais de Tokyo to the Maison Rouge, from the MONA (Australia) to the DOX in Prague and The Rencontres d’Arles, his Sibylline maps have been constantly interrogating.