Michel Nedjar in Theatre of Cruelty
curator: Agnes Gryczkowska
Curated by Agnes Gryczkowska, the exhibition Theatre of Cruelty is rooted in, and takes its name from French artist Antonin Artaud’s (1896-1948) radical vision of experimental theatre. Six works by Michel Nedjar, loaned by the gallery, are shown alongside those of eight other artists.
In dialogue with works by Artaud, the exhibition gathers artists across generations and disciplines— Ed Atkins, Angélique Aubrit & Ludovic Beillard, Tobias Bradford, Romeo Castellucci, Pan Daijing, Tadeusz Kantor, Liza Lacroix, and Michel Nedjar. Through theatre, performance, sound, painting, sculpture, video, and kinetic installation, their works refuse narrative comfort, instead staging acts of exorcisms that unsettle and disturb, embodying existential melancholy, ruptured language, the force of gesture, and the primal energy Artaud imagined.
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.