6TH BIENNIAL OF ART BRUT: FACES – FROM DECEMBER 8, 2023 TO APRIL 28, 2024

The sixth edition of the Art Brut biennials addresses a recurring theme in Art Brut works, that of the face. The systematic exploration of the Lausanne museum’s funds resulted in a selection of more than 330 pieces, confirming the richness and diversity of the contexts, supports, techniques and graphic forms from which these representations emerge.

The face embodies this unique part of the human being which condenses, through its workmanship and its expressions, the whole person, their body and their psyche. The works presented invite us to a unique experience, that of meeting the other within ourselves, which questions us and opens us to the experience of the intimate: “what we see, what looks at us”, writes Georges Didi -Hubermann.

In the field of Art Brut and its productions marked by a form of absolute necessity to create, this exploration acquires a singular dimension: it highlights the inalienable humanity of their authors, beyond their social or cultural marginality.

These faces, whose attentive, interrogative, communicative or absent tone expresses a form of withdrawal or quest, question, like an abyss, our own relationship to humans and the world. As a “viewer”, to quote Marcel Duchamp, we are invited by these very diverse physiognomies to a constantly renewed experience, which touches, even shakes up, what is the basis of our identity.

These faces invited for the biennial invite us in turn, without disguise or complacency; let us allow ourselves to be reassured or disturbed by their outpouring and thus join their creators.

The exhibition is divided into six sections, each of which demonstrates a different modality, function or approach to the creative process: Textile faces, Faces in volume, Faces on a journey, Faces in portrait, Graphic variations of the face and Emergences of the face .

Curator: Pascal Roman, professor of clinical psychology, psychopathology and psychoanalysis

Coordination: Pauline Mack