guided tour by laurianne melierre

Committed at 31 years old after participating in the Spanish Civil War, Carlo Zinelli is now seen as a major figure of art brut. Like tales illustrating episodes of his life before his internment, his iterative and dislocated drawings in which perspective is abandoned and replaced by interstitial writings aligned with the concept of “modernity”. Honoured in many international exhibitions, Carlo Zinelli was exhibited in the Giardini at the 2013 Venice Biennale. A significant number of his works was donated to the Centre Pompidou in 2021.

A poor child of Mississippi condemned to the hardest work, this African-American woman began, at the dawn of her life, a work that resembles a real graphic blues. Mary T. Smith gave shape to her personal cosmology by painting on sheets of corrugated iron and wooden panels
arranged around her house. Her “solar aesthetic”—says Daniel Soutif—and her powerfully elementary modes of representation made a strong impression on Jean‑Michel Basquiat. Now considered an emblematic figure of American art brut, her works have been added to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), the Smithsonian Museum of American Art (Washington) and the High Museum of Art (Atlanta) collections.

A frequent participant to the Blu Cammello workshop in Livorno, Bellucci was first discovered by artist Riccardo Bargellini. The hybrid sculptures he produces are made up of heterogeneous objects whose fates are inexorably linked, observed sometimes through the prism of their transitional, fetishist or apotropaic value.
Present in the collections of the Musée National d’Art Moderne (Pompidou) and the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, his works have been shown in several major exhibitions, notably at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris.
“These works are endowed with a symbolic power that many ‘professional’ artists are incapable of achieving. “(P. Dagen, Le Monde)

Leopold Strobl has been part of Gugging (Austria) for the last ten years, finding comfort and redemption in art, a way of holding his mental demons off. He draws with colored pencil on small-format. Crafted on landscape photographs found in newspapers, his drawings are similar to magnetic portals. Strobl is part of the Museum Of Modern Art (New York) collections since 2018, his work was presented the following year in the exhibition Photo | Brut at the Rencontres d’Arles.

This is the story of an anonymous photographic collection that surfaced from the secret depths to which it seemed doomed. Hundreds of amateur prints created over the course of a decade, between 1996 and 2006, that bear witness to the fetishistic habits of its author, manifested through pictures of legs covered with tights, taken either in the street or from a television screen. His practice evokes that of Miroslav Tichý, with the principal difference that our photographer sometimes becomes a subject himself. In both cases—as is often true with art brut—are the burning questions of the construction to which our gaze proceeds and of the collective imagination’s role in this individual[…]