the lack
curators : sophie calle & christian berst
The exhibition Le manque (The Lack) is the result of a dialogue built around works either created or collected by Sophie Calle, alongside pieces of Art Brut selected from the Christian Berst gallery.
All of these works resonate within the same register of absence—truncated bodies, silhouettes fading into darkness, shadowy zones, crossed-out or hidden texts, eloquent omissions…
Rather than responding to the gallerist’s invitation to curate the show, Sophie Calle proposed a collaborative approach: “I asked Christian Berst to search in his storage for works that conceal something,” she says.
For Sophie Calle, absence is a creative force—an invitation to repair, to reconstruct through storytelling, to exist through the other by transforming ordinary objects into relics of incomplete stories.
Opposite her, Art Brut draws the contours of an inner world where the viewer must fill in the blanks, imagine a narrative. Each Art Brut piece becomes an attempt at reconstruction, an intimate response to what has been lost—or never found.
These missing parts reveal a paradoxical presence, a story greater than what is shown to us.
