salon du dessin contemporain

Luboš Plný whose international recognition was confirmed by his selection in the 57th Venice Biennale titled Viva Arte Viva (curated by Christine Macel) in 2017. As the first outsider artist acquired by the MNAM in 2013, he has enjoyed numerous institutional exhibitions in recent years. These include exhibitions at contemporary art museums in Kobe and Hiroshima, Japan, at the Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles, at the Kunsthalle in Dresden, and in his hometown of Prague. In 2017, the Dox Art Center dedicated a solo exhibition to him, and in 2022, the Rudolfinum facilitated a dialogue between him and artists such as Louise Bourgeois and William Kentridge. In September 2023, we dedicated a solo show to him in our two spaces, a monography and a performance at the Beaux-Arts de Paris.

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.

At a very young age, Marilena Pelosi began to make drawings in which exuberant Catholicism and feverish Macumba, from her native Brazil, swirled to the point of delirium. The reminiscence of trance, eucharistic processions and carnivals are inextricably combined with much more intimate evocations. Established in France for several decades, she continues these same troubling drawings, made with ballpoint pens, in which doll-women are both executioners and victims. Now part of the CNAP collection, in 2019 she will join BIC (France), and in 2021 the Musée d’art moderne (Pompidou, France). In 2023, we presented works by Marilena Pelosi at ARCO Madrid.

Royal Robertson spent most of his life in Louisiana with his wife and eleven children. A sign painter by training, his paranoid schizophrenia triggers in him a prodigious creative fever. Ethereal ascents, portraits of deities, futuristic architectures alike “show houses” of a world to come, it is as if he had descended from his planet, carrying his own Tablets of Law. Featured in countless international collections, such as the Smithsonian Museum of American Art (USA) or the Musée national d’Art moderne (Pompidou), his work was presented in 2018-19 in the travelling exhibition Into The Unknown, produced by the Barbican (London) and curated by Patrick Gyger.