salon du dessin contemporain

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.

Josef Hofer, who has been a resident of an Austrian institution for over 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 considered him “one of the greatest of the brut contemporary artists.” A significant number of his works were 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) and was recently included in the collections of LaM - Lille Métropole Musée d’Art Moderne, Art Contemporain, and Art Brut in 2025 (France).

“Prophet” Royal Robertson spent most of his life in Louisiana with his wife and eleven children. Trained as a sign painter, 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 Stone. 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.