NYAB Event - Jean Dubuffet “Anticultural Positions”

Jean Dubuffet “Anticultural Positions”

Acquavella Galleries

This event has ended.

Acquavella Galleries presents Jean Dubuffet: Anticultural Positions, the first exhibition surveying Dubuffet’s early work in painting and sculpture in over two decades. Organized by curator Mark Rosenthal, the exhibition focuses on Dubuffet’s work from 1943 to 1959, and emphasizes the artist’s “anti-cultural” approach in his depiction of subjects and his use of unorthodox materials. Several works by the French painter are on loan from private collections and museums.

During the 1940s and ‘50s, Dubuffet advocated a transgressive anti-cultural position—a nihilistic spirit in the context of a war-ravaged Europe. His fascination with Hans Prinzhorn’s Artistry of the Mentally Ill deeply influenced his artistic practice, and led to his coining of the term “Art Brut.” For Dubuffet, the raw and uninhibited expression of Art Brut provided a fresh and alternative direction to what he saw as the stifling decorum and conformity of French culture and the Western tradition. In 1947 he arranged an exhibition of objects produced by children and the mentally ill. He admired the intuitive spirit of children’s drawings, graffiti, and the art of the ill, which he believed relied on the inner world of the creative mind and rejected traditional notions of taste, beauty, and skill. Emulating these ‘outsider’ artworks, Dubuffet created assemblages with detritus like glue, plaster, putty, gravel and broken bottles. He would scribble and scratch their surfaces to give the impression of tactile, chaotic, graffiti-covered walls. His formless renderings of the human figure echo his fixation with the art practices of those he considered “unscathed by artistic culture.”

“Dubuffet was one of the great disruptors of art history,” said Mark Rosenthal. “He invented an unlikely cast of characters who took center stage as his subjects, and he utilized the most humble of materials, all of which projected new visions of beauty.”

A fully illustrated hardcover catalogue will accompany the exhibition, and will include texts by Mark Rosenthal, Kent Minturn, an art historian and expert on the work of Dubuffet, and longstanding MoMA conservator Anny Aviram.