Gironella, Kamae, Podesta, Tassini…

Born in Catalonia, Gironella (1911-1997) followed at an early age in his father’s footsteps in cork craftsmanship. He engenders a lifelong history with cork, which the exile to France forced by Franco will not stop. 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 of Barcelona).

The man and his creation are as atypical as they are inseparable: while Podesta decorates his apartment, readily crafting furniture and objects in ways as improbable as they are admirable, he also uses himself as an object of creation, adorning himself with costumes and accessories of his own making, and parading through the city. Through this production, a form of “self-cultivation,” “Podesta attacked what the most avant-garde and subversive artists of his time had nevertheless always respected: the apparatus of fine art.” (Lucienne Peiry) Giovanni Battista Podesta, born in 1895 in Torre Pallavicina (northern Italy), is the only son of a peasant family of thirteen children. The father[…]

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