ukai, wölfli, ramírez…

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.⁠

The technical skill, stylistic evolution, and thematic coherence of Ramírez led Roberta Smith of The New York Times to describe him as ‘simply one of the greatest artists of the 20th century.’ Ramírez’s talents were recognized early on in small exhibitions as early as the 1950s. Present in the guggenheim and moma collections, in 2010, the 20th-century master was the subject of a comprehensive exhibition organized by Brooke Davis Anderson at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reína Sofía in Madrid, titled Martín Ramírez: Reframing Confinement. In 2015, the United States Postal Service issued a series of five commemorative stamps Martin Ramirez Forever.

Adolf Wölfli is the emblematic figure of 20th century art brut, author of more than 1,500 drawings and of a 25,000-page biography. He has built a personal and complex universe, where he reinvents his past and projects a utopian future, colonized to the edge of space. The richness and excess of this work cause vertigo. The list of artists he fascinates is long (among them Jean Dubuffet, Annette Messager, Arnulf Rainer), and an echo to his presence in the collections of the Musée National d’Art Moderne (France), Prinzhorn collection (Germany), and the LaM (France). As André Breton pointed out, this is “one of the three or four major works of the 20th century.”

Yuichiro Ukai, a member of the renowned Yamanami workshop in Japan, is a passionate illustrator: he strives to draw, from memory, characters from the manga world, etchings, and from encyclopedic works on Reptiliomorpha. These serials or polyptych drawings, often overloaded and of a breathtaking precision, are singularly reminiscent of the triptychs of the Flemish primitive, Jérôme Bosch. Exhibited for the first time in France at the gallery in 2019, his work is now very popular, especially as its rarity only sharpens this appeal.