art paris art fair 2014

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 made hundreds of portraits of Marie decked out with Christmas decorations, patterned fabrics and copper crowns, in often-erotic poses, seated on a chair in front of a setting that had been cobbled together. Marie becomes, by turns, a goddess, queen, star, seductress, or ingenue.

Luboš Plný’s international recognition was firmly established in 2017, when he was selected for the 57th Venice Biennale. The first Art Brut artist to be acquired by the Musée National d’Art Moderne (MNAM) in 2013, he has since been the subject of exhibitions at the contemporary art museums of Kobe and Hiroshima, the Kunsthalle Dresden, and in his native Prague, where the Rudolfinum, notably, brought his work into dialogue with artists such as Louise Bourgeois and William Kentridge in 2022. In September 2023, we dedicated a solo exhibition to him across both our spaces, published a monograph, and presented a performance at the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris.

More than twenty years ago, Harald Stoffers began a fictional correspondence with his mother, in which all the letters started with “Liebe Mutti.” He began this exercise at a workshop for people with disabilities where he worked. He began by distributing them among his fellow workers as small torn notes. Presented in a film by Youssef Tabti at the Grand Palais in 2009, his work was included in institutions like the Mona (Australia), the Hamburger Bahnhof—National Gallery of Contemporary Art (Berlin), the Pinacoteca Agnelli (Turin), Galerie der Villa (Hamburg), l’Oliva Creative Factory (Portugal), le Dox Art Center (Prague), and the Maison Rouge (Paris). A significant number of his works were donated to the Centre Pompidou collection in 2021.

Having become, in a decade, one of the most recognized contemporary brut artists, this autistic native of California is sometimes compared to Cy Twombly: while the latter deconstructs language, the former builds it. Since 2010, the gallery has contributed to its international recognition by organizing several exhibitions and publishing the only monograph available to date, enriched with an essay by Richard Leemann. Present in countless public and private collections - including those of the MoMA and Pompidou –, Dan Miller’s work was also part of the official selection of the 2017 Venice Biennale.