Corps – ART BRUT La collection

Devoted to the body, this third volume of the series Art Brut La Collection, which accompanies the Biennials of Art Brut, proposes exclusively works from the collections of the Lausanne museum – some of which are rarely exhibited. The book brings together a large number of drawings, paintings, photographs and sculptures and reflects the multiple representations of the body in the productions of Outsider Art, without losing sight of the dimension of the intimate dialogue that the authors maintain with their creations. These works are about body to body; they constitute “battles” without mediation or concession that the creator leads with his own image and his singular experience. For some of them, the body is the refuge of a complex intimacy; for others, a prison to escape, or the center of energies to be released and transformed. Rarely exhibited and published, the prisoners’ tattoos attest to the interest of Jean Dubuffet, founder of the concept of Art Brut, and at the origin of the Lausanne museum, for creations situated on the margins of the art world. The great “classics” of Outsider Art, such as Aloïse Corbaz, rub shoulders with more recent discoveries, such as the body-faces of Eric Derkenne, or the very powerful “nuclear transsexuality” of Giovanni Galli. Self-doubling and mirror games testify to an instinctive identity quest, as in Josef Hofer and Robert Gie. Divided and fragmented, with Giovanni Bosco, or gathered in a cosmic unity, with Guo Fengyi, the body materializes a perpetual flow which art can seize to make an existential testimony.