Gironella, Kamae, Podesta, Tassini…

Born in Catalonia, Gironella (1911-1997) followed at an early age in his father’s footsteps in cork craftsmanship. Engendering a lifelong history with cork, unbothered by the exile to France forced by Franco. Thus, in 1948, Jean Dubuffet and André Breton dedicated an exhibition to him. Then, in 1967, Gironella is included in the exhibition L’art brut at the Musée des Arts Décoratif (Paris), hosted by François Mathey, then chief curator. Since 2021, he has been part of the traveling exhibition Francesc Tosquelles. Comme une machine à coudre dans un champ de blé, which will end its road at the New York American Folk Art Museum (after Les Abattoirs, Toulouse ; The Reina Sofía Museum , Madrid ; Contemporary cultural center Barcelone).

Giovanni Battista Podesta, born in 1895 in Torre Pallavicina (northern Italy), is the only son of a peasant family of thirteen children very poor, the father having died young, Giovanni environment is exclusively female. Its financial condition forced him to leave school at the age of ten in favor of aid work mason. Called to war, he knows his return and reintegration difficulties must resign himself to commit three years with the carabinieri. It is then sent to Laveno, a small village on the shores of Lake Maggiore, where he met his future wife whom he married after leaving his post to work in a ceramics factory. The couple has two children. Joint, Giovanni began his creative activity. He[…]

For more than thirty years, Pascal Tassini has been frequenting the Workshop of Créahm (Belgium), where he created his own house of objects attached to each other by rosaries of cloth knots. As with Schwitters, Tassini’s Merzbau is protean and evolutionary. This “hidden husband of Annette Messenger” (says Léa Chauvel-Lévy) produces, with a similar process, the various elements necessary for the sumptuous wedding he dreams of, from the wedding dress to the buttonholes. Presented in 2019 in the exhibition “Extravaganza” of the Treger Saint Silvestre collection, Pascal Tassini is also part of the collections of the Madmusée (Belgium) and the Hervé Lancelin Pinacotheque (Luxembourg).

After graduating from high school, Kazumi participated in Atelier Yamanami in 1985. Not confident of her words and actions, she had a hard time to tell others what she wanted to do or to express her feeling and desire with words. Both she and people around her were struggling for a long time to decide what’s best for Kazumi. One day, Kazumi fell in love with a man. She learned the joy to express her own feeling with clay, being encouraged or briefly commented by him. From this, she became more confident of herself little by little and was able to actively communicate with someone she loved and other people through creating and presenting her own work. At the beginning of her creation, she[…]