BRASSAÏ – DUBUFFET

OCTOBER 28 - DECEMBER 3, 2011

Opening reception
Friday, October 28, 2011, 6 - 8 pm

The show will be accompanied by a catalogue

The Karsten Greve Gallery is pleased to pay homage to the artists Brassaï and Jean Dubuffet in the context of an exhibition that reveals a reflection on a theme that connects them in a rather astonishing way - "Graffiti". Brassaï and Dubuffet approach the city as though it were a large prehistoric cave, as spectators of a wild and anarchic society stripped of any kind of aestheticism.

Equipped with his camera, Brassaï (1899 - 1984) captured ordinary traces of the inhabitants of Paris' streets beginning in the 1930's, thus discovering a hidden and unsuspected, though omnipresent expression. Dubuffet (1901-1985) incorporated the materiality and the texture of daily life on his canvasses, on paper and in lithography. In his opinion, the materiality does not show differences between human beings and their urban lifestyle. Human creatures are depicted, preferably in front of walls, detached from the space, stuck vertically "like posters, neither more nor less alive than the graffiti they resemble so much, they could be mistaken for it" (Noël Arnaud, 1961).

Two major post war artists are herein being featured: Brassaï, a less known member, though an important one, of the Surrealist movement, and Dubuffet, who was at the origins of Art Brut. The exhibition will be accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue with texts by Brassaϊ himself and Sophie Webel, Fondation Dubuffet, in English, French and German.


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