DUBUFFET
11/12/2019 - 01/11/2020DUBUFFET /
The baudoin lebon gallery is honored to present this new exhibition on Jean Dubuffet around Matière et Mémoire, Mire G88 Kowloon, Parachiffre XL and his books. French Painter, sculptor, printmaker, collector and writer, Dubuffet was temperamentally opposed to authority and devised for himself a coherent, if rebellious, attitude towards the arts and culture. For all his maverick challenges to the values of the art world, Dubuffet's career exemplified the way in which an avant-garde rebel could encounter notoriety, then fame and reverence. His revolt against beauty and conformity has come to be seen as a symptomatic and appreciable influence in 20th-century culture.
Jean Dubuffet was born on July 31st, 1901, in Le Havre. It was not until he turned 41, after a career in the wine business, that Dubuffet decisively turned to art. In postwar Paris, he is the precursor of the style called l'art brut. He begins making prints in the mid-1940s, achieving a total output of some 1500 works, many for illustrated books. In the process of this abundant production, he revolutionizes lithography. He makes Matière et Mémoire, his first ensemble of lithographs that is made up of 27 lithographs on paper, at the beginning of his artistic career in 1944-1945. His experimentation with surface texture is already visible in Matière et Mémoire, in which he scratched the lithographic stones with sandpaper, rubbed them with rags, and used other unconventional materials to achieve the varied effects he desired. The artist thus gives a whole range of fascinating nuances to the uniform black.
