A Century of Art Brut (1926–2026)
Through 13 Masterpieces
The gallery is delighted to participate in Art Basel Paris, at the Grand Palais (booth 1.G7) from October 23 to 25.
For this edition, we present a dialogue between 13 masterpieces created between 1926 and 2026 by major figures of Art Brut: Adolf Wölfli, Anna Zemánková, Franco Bellucci, Guo Fengyi, Michel Nedjar, Luboš Plný, Damián Valdés Dilla, and George Widener.
For all their differences, these artists share not so much a formal language as a common imperative: to create in order to make a world of their own.
Art Brut, then, cannot be reduced to an aesthetic of marginality, much less to any supposed lack of skill or notion of cultural innocence. Its elsewhere is neither geographical, historical, nor stylistic. It is inward.
The fact that these works have now found their way into major international collections and leading contemporary art exhibitions does not bestow legitimacy upon them. Rather, it reflects how slowly art history is catching up. Perhaps these artists were never outside art at all. They simply occupied a place that the art world had not yet learned to see.
And it is from that very place that they continue to ask us a fundamental question: why do human beings create?
