drawing now 2014

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.

When Beverly Baker sits at her worktable, the ritual is always the same: on the blank piece of paper, with a ballpoint pen, the artist begins to trace letters on which she will draw until the meaning is annihilated. Her work is reminiscent of that of Twombly, Serra or Tapiès. A member of the « Latitute Artist » workshop (Kentucky), Beverly Baker has been presented twice at the Maison rouge (Paris) in these exhibitions: Le Mur, artworks from the Antoine de Galbert collection and art brut, abcd/Bruno Decharme collection and won the Wynn Newhouse Award in 2017.

Yuichi Saito is fascinated by popular Japanese shows. At the workshop of Kobe Shu (Saitama), which he has been attending since 2002, he began graphic work around these television programs, methodically writing, in a broad gesture, the title of each of them. His drawings have since then reached a degree of visual abstraction of great intensity. More recently, he has undertaken work on the mo character of the hiragana alphabet: its repetitions reveal his emotional states. His work has been shown in the collections of the Museum of Everything, at MONA, in Tasmania, and during the closing exhibition of the Maison Rouge (France): L’envol ou Le rêve de voler. An important part of his work has been donated to the Centre Pompidou in 2021.

José Johann Seinen, born in the Netherlands in 1934, produced, with obsessive care, a unique body of work that could be compared to a personal mythology where archaeology and sci-fi are intertwined. It is a spectacular project, one that also asks the question of the game in art. When his parents, suspected of collaborating with the Germans during the Occupation, were imprisoned at the end of the war, José and his five brothers were placed in the custody of their grandparents, who lived in Amsterdam. There, he began drawing tirelessly: exercise books designed like pop-up books filled with robots and – from the start – careful, minuscule cut-outs, small figures of a private theatre that the[…]