Bruno Decharme — Art brut / Collection abcd — La Maison Rouge — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: October 18, 2014 → January 18, 2015

For its twelfth showing of a private collection, la maison rouge invites Bruno Decharme to present his exceptional collection of art brut.

The genre has, in recent years, gained prominence: the market for art brut has taken off worldwide; specialised galleries and fairs are increasingly numerous; art brut features in exhibitions of contemporary art, including the last Venice Biennale (curated by Massimiliano Gioni).

Art brut raises questions. La maison rouge stages regular showings of art brut and its founder, Antoine de Galbert, is also a collector.

Since la maison rouge opened in 2004, we have sought to make bridges between different fields of creativity through exhibitions that show art brut alongside contemporary works (Arnulf Rainer’s collection of art brut and Inspired Artists : Elmar Trenkwalder and Augustin Lesage), or which return to major corpuses such as those of Louis Soutter or Henry Darger.

As part of this ongoing cycle showing private collections, we felt the time had come for us to turn our attention to the largest private collection of art brut in the world.

Bruno Decharme has assembled his collection over more than thirty years. It now comprises 3,500 works by 300 artists from numerous countries and from the mid-1800s to the present day. Some of these works were produced in mental institutions, others in the solitude of our towns and villages. Some are mediumistic works, others are folk objects which escape the conventions of tradition.

Bruno Decharme’s collection descends from the collecting and research undertaken by pioneering psychiatrists such as Hans Prinzhorn, or artists and writers such as André Breton.

Such works were theorised in 1945 by Jean Dubuffet who invented the concept of art brut (“outsider art”).

By placing these productions under the umbrella of art, Dubuffet initiated a radical paradigm shift that incites us to rethink our idea of art.