Body

This third volume (after Vehicles and Architecture) in the series entitled Art Brut: The Collection, accompanying the Biennales de l’Art Brut, includes only works from the Lausanne museum, some of which have rarely been exhibited. The book contains a large number of drawings, paintings, photographs and sculptures, reflecting the manifold representations of the human body in Art Brut, while paying close attention to the intimate relationship the artists have established with their creations. These works represent a sort of hand-to-hand combat; they are ‘battles’ in which no quarter is asked or given between the creator and his own image and unique personal history. For some the body is the refuge of a complex intimacy, for others it is a prison from which to escape, and for still others a storehouse of energy that needs to be set free and transformed. Rarely exhibited or published, Jean Dubuffet’s prisoners’ tattoos reveal how creations lying on the margins of art’s traditional subject matter held a magnetic attraction for the founder of the concept of Art Brut, the core of the Lausanne museum’s collection. The great ‘classics’ of Art Brut, such as Aloïse Corbaz, rub shoulders with more recent discoveries, such as Eric Derkenne’s body-faces, or the all-powerful ‘nuclear trans-sexuality’ of Giovanni Galli. The doubling of the self and a play of mirrors highlight the instinctive search for identity typical of Josef Hofer and Robert Gie. Whether dismembered and fragmented in Giovanni Bosco’s work, or tightly gathered in cosmic unity in Guo Fengyi’s creations, the body gives form to a perpetual flux which art can exploit to express existential experience.