This exhibition, created in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou Paris, takes you on a journey into the world of Jean Dubuffet. It is through an exceptional selection of important works articulated according to a chronological course around highlights alternating masterpieces of his painting and major sets of his works on paper, drawings and gouaches.
This retrospective is an opportunity to understand the essence of Jean Dubuffet’s work, his obsession with non-conformism, his love of art brut, that of the uninitiated. In his “first works” that Dubuffet lists as such, made from 1942, the painter expresses his interest in children’s drawings, graffiti and art brut, a term he would later coin to designate the artistic productions of people evolving outside of any cultural context.
For the painter, the art brut is a necessary condition for the evolution of the world. By studying these works, by collecting them assiduously, he seeks himself to reach a deconditioning, to allow him to change the proposed perspective, to change the glance carried on the things, on the world.
This retrospective is also an opportunity to discover that Jean Dubuffet, the prolific artist, the painter resistant to conventions, both social and pictorial, was also a writer. Through seminal writings, he exposes his anti-cultural positions, in parallel to his career as a painter, preferring to frequent artists than writers.
In this exhibition you will find the inexhaustible creativity of this artist who knew how to make his style evolve throughout his life, and who, paradoxically, after having refused the dominant culture, schools, currents and techniques taught, became a major artist in the artistic landscape of the second half of the 20th century.
Fondation Gianadda
Rue du Forum 59, Case Postale 528, 1920 Martigny
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