artgenève

Committed at 31 years old after participating in the Spanish Civil War, Carlo Zinelli is now seen as a major figure of art brut. Like tales illustrating episodes of his life before his internment, his iterative and dislocated drawings in which perspective is abandoned and replaced by interstitial writings aligned with the concept of “modernity”. Honoured in many international exhibitions, Carlo Zinelli was exhibited in the Giardini at the 2013 Venice Biennale. A significant number of his works was donated to the Centre Pompidou in 2021.

Josef Hofer, who has been a resident of an Austrian institution for more than 30 years, does not speak. He draws. Tirelessly. In the metaphoric mirror that he uses and reaches out to us, people attempt to flee from the straitjacket of the frame with eroticized and untamed grace. His works - to which Michel Thévoz has devoted several essays - depict a founding duality between body and psyche. Present in numerous museum collections, he is also part of great private collections: A. de Galbert (France), A. Shaker (Switzerland) and even in the collection of A. Rainer (Austria), who considers him “one of the greatest of the brut contemporary artists.” A significant number of his works was donated to the Centre Pompidou collection in 2021 while the gallery became the owner of his estate in 2022.

Interned since his teens, André Robillard has built his life within the hospital. It was around the age of 30 that this French artist began to create rifles with materials found here and there. Discovered by Jean Dubuffet and encouraged by Michel Thévoz (then director of the Art Brut collection), he continues to create hybrid objects, from machine guns to Sputnik. André Robillard’s incredible story has participated to his international recognition. Present in the collections of the LaM (France), Whitworth (UK) or MAC’s (Belgium), he was particularly celebrated in the closing exhibition of la maison rouge (Paris) in 2018. A significant number of his works was donated to the Centre Pompidou in 2021.

It was in the early 1960s that this Moravian woman began producing a body of work for which her humble background had not prepared her and which responded strikingly to injunctions from the innermost depths. Thus, at a time when the demons of the night were still competing with the seminal iridescence of dawn, she would gather strange flowers in her mind before drawing them forth on paper. ‘‘I grow flowers that don’t grow anywhere else,’’ she used to say. Anna Zemánková is already an established figure in the art brut, so much so that in 2013 she was honored at the 55th Venice Biennale before an important group of her works joined the collections of the Centre Pompidou and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 2020.