October 18, 2014–January 18, 2015
La maison rouge
10 bd de la bastille
75012 Paris
Hours: Wednesday–Sunday11am–7pm,
Thursday 11am–9pm
In what is its 12th exhibition of a private collection, la maison rouge is presenting the world’s biggest privately held ensemble of art brut, owned by Frenchman Bruno Decharme.
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. Art brut raises questions. La maison rouge stages regular showings of art brut and its founder, Antoine de Galbert, is also a collector. Since opening in 2004, la maison rouge has 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.
This exhibition presents a selection of 400 of the 3,500 works gathered by Bruno Decharme over the last 30 years and more, made by artists from all around the world in the period going from the mid-19th century to the present day. It was conceived by Bruno Decharme and Antoine de Galbert as a sequence of 12 thematic sections, or a journey in 12 stages that guides visitors through a corpus that is still little known and has long been ignored by art history.
